Let me guess, you are printing to an HP (or another printer that uses PCL). If you are then, you have run into one of Java's "Features" according to a help ticket I put in with Sun. PCL causes a very verbose print and Sun does not have a fix or a planned change for it. "It is that way by design..." according to Sun.
What I have done is to change the print drivers in some applications, in some applications I found the delay livable, and for one application--I know of the team rewrote windows printer interface using JNI.