controlling shared printers

[dazz williams]

Here's a question I'm not sure has an answer given the limitations of the situation; but I thought I'd ask since a forum full of heads is better than just one.....

I help an SMB with all their computer stuff. In their main office they have a couple rooms of computers for their employees to use (which are all networked on the LAN), as well as some employees having their own computers in their own office (also networked on the LAN).
Let's assume that all computers are PCs with WinXP Home (because all the ones that matter here are such).
In one public computer room there are 3 computers and 2 printers. The idea is that these 2 printers only be shared amongst the 3 computers in the room since they're not very heavy duty and weren't made for the whole office to be printing to them. We have a large Canon printer that the whole network can print to, but it's accounted and thus costs them money. Therefore, some of them who know how to search for a network printer have added the 2 smaller printers and are printing to them (since it's free for those 2 smaller computers). [note, the large Canon printer is attached directly to the network via an ether cable, the 2 smaller printers are attached to 2 of the 3 computers in that one room and those computers share the printers to the network)]
It's not a big deal, other than the fact that the smaller printers are not made for everybody printing to them and will jam much more easily, and I'm actually more curious as to if it's possible. I did some research but any solution I found involved using the printer's Security tab/options and specifying certain users, but this is not available in WinXP Home.
Is there a way to share those 2 smaller printers with just the 3 computers in that room (which all happen to be the only ones into the router in the room, if that matters/helps) w/out allowing other computers to access the printers? I mean, other than periodically going to every computer in the office and deleting the 2 printers in the Printers and Faxes... which I can't anyways cause some ppl own their own computers.
Just throwing that out there, any ideas?
dazz.
PS - I don't know why the computers here all have WinXP Home for the most part... were like that before I came here. I would've suggested Pro because of all the networking.

[DJMaze]

Printer password?

Pro has no printer passwords either.
Try to google for: "XP network security crap"
You will notice that you should use Windows 2000

Why they use XP Home?

Simple, the computers are bought with it and the crappy salesman never asked or mentioned XP due to his lack of knowledge.
This is very common...

Can i solve this?

Spam MS support desk, then maybe someday it is reverted.

note

If the computers have an Intel duo-core CPU then they are realy screwed.
XP Home only uses one of the cores, not both. You need XP Pro for that.

[redhead]

Is there a way to share those 2 smaller printers with just the 3 computers in that room (which all happen to be the only ones into the router in the room, if that matters/helps)

So add the three computers to their own IP-segment, like 172.16.37.10/28 and never let any of the other computers have routing tables that resembles these.
Let's say the rest of the computers have the IP-segment 10.1.1.0/24 then it's just a matter of configuring the firewall/extern router to handle routing from internal requests with IP aliases representing both segments, same goes for the Canon printer, and at the firewall/extern router have no routing info telling it that those two segments should ever talk to eachother.

Then the only way it can be a problem is, if the computers from both segments, are sharing folders from eachother.