Printing problems

[v.demartino2 at virgilio.it]

I have many problems in setting an epson stylus color 640 up on my FreeBSD
5.3 box. I compiled apsfilter to be used with the UNIX lpd and obviously
configured it with the eps640pl.upp (360x360 dpi) gs driver.

To put it in a nutshell my FreeBSD box prints BUT it is :
(i) Unbelievably slow (something like 15 minutes for a simple text page!)
(ii) The quality of printing is very poor, ligth and not sharp

This is what /var/log/messages says about the printing stuff:
.............................
kernel: ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0
 kernel: ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode
 kernel: ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/8 bytes threshold
 kernel: ppbus0: <Parallel port bus> on ppc0
 kernel: ppbus0: IEEE1284 device found /NIBBLE
 kernel: Probing for PnP devices on ppbus0:
 kernel: ppbus0: <EPSON Stylus COLOR 640> PRINTER ESCPL2,BDC
................................................
 lpd[612]: lp: open(/var/spool/lpd/lp/log): No such file or directory
 VicBSD kernel: Interrupt storm detected on "irq7: lpt0"; throttling interrupt
source

In device.hints:

hint.ppc.0.at="isa"
hint.ppc.0.irq="7"

Why is that and what should I do?
Please help

Vittorio