I think you need to specify a little more info regardin the problem you are having... which dos program are you running? is it delaying your printer during program execution, or is the printer now perpetually delayed? more info is needed.
My DOS program compiled with Qbasic has no problems running windows 98. But the printer will delay for about 10 seconds before starting to print on Windows XP|-)
perhaps the data transfer to the print buffer is a little slow? My printer doesn't start printing right away either... maybe a dot-matrix takes a little longer. Is this a new occurence? Or has it always printed a little slow?