[gr8fl4porsche]

Printer drivers are a manufacturer issue - not the OS. Win7 will most likely do nothing to help your printer come on line unless the manufacturer writes a 7 driver. If they passed on Vista - then likely they will pass on 7. Lots of manufacturers don't care much about supporting older hardware. They want you to buy new stuff.

You can get everything to work with Vista, 7, XP, etc. - just depends on how important it is to you.

3rd party companies write drivers for all kinds of hardware and especially older expensive printers. They don't give them away though - $200 a driver is not uncommon.

The other answer is a Virtual Machine. You can create a VM with freeware - VirtualBox is what I started using to get an older large format printer running on modern systems.

Install VirtualBox.
Install Vista32 or XP on the VM.
Now you can install the printer.

The downside is the the printer will only be available through the VM.
I have not found a way to get a 'shortcut' to the virtual printer to work without going through the VM.
Open the VM. Now you have a window on your screen that is another computer with another OS. Print away.

Win7 Ultimate comes with a free Virtual Machine and Virtual XP to solve the issue you both have.