The lack of printer drivers for a printer plugged in and turned on or off, in my opinion, will never cause this problem that you have. Unless the printer was damaged and was shorting out or something that serious, perhaps then, but not just a lack of printer drivers.
If you eliminate the printer from your system is your pc ok or have you tried that?
As for windows repair, have a look here and follow that:
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm
Personally, i havent used windows repair a whole lot. But you can go to microsoft website and find more info there as well, but i think the link above is likely enough info for you.
Without reading your posts over, do i recall that you installed service pack 2?
If you have other older hardware like your printer then its possible an uninstall of service pack 2 might do the trick for you. Sp2 can be uninstalled, see here:
http://support.microsoft.com/KB/875350
I really would suggest you uninstall sp2 as it might fix everything up for you. Plus you can add it back any time you want if removal doesnt work.
Personally, with all my customers, i dont install these types of service packs until they are one to 2 yrs old as it takes that long for them to become worthy of installation, lol. Plus, again, with somewhat older hardware, sp2 can cause all kinds of problems. Sp1 caused enough already without sp2!
I am not railing against m\soft we just have to remember that if we are dealing with older hardware we should first upgrade all the hardware drivers to the latest so these service packs will work right. Since you seem to have an older printer you may be out of luck with that and sp2. Printers are so cheap these days, is there a reason you dont get a new one? Is this printer a special, perhaps dot-matrix or some other special type that you need?
Or is it just an old printer? Lots of old printers should work anyway, windows is pretty good with printer drivers, but you never know!
Try out the above stuff and see how you do.