When I print the device queue, if I see a lot of old entries with a status of "premature", what might be the problem? I know this should be the temporary status when we are in the middle of sending data to a device. On older entires, does this mean the process was killed before finishing? Occasionally the message "Cannot start print job" is seen by a user. Is that related?

yep.

If the print process was terminated for whatever reason, the queue might show the premature status until the end of time (or at least until 2021).

Another good reason to clean up your device queues on a frequent basis.

Ed,

Check the following. Do you get a single report that consistently gives you a premature status - too long that the user is killing the process.

Another reason that you may have a premature status is described next. We have a bunch of printers that are driven for Streamserve. All these printers had a hard coded output path like ${HOME}/ss_prtr. The idea was that a single user will not print two reports at the same time. Guess again :). Coupled with generic logins from Connectware, we were running into the "Premature" status more often than we liked. We fixed this by writing a wrapper around ottstpconv to create a temp file in ${BSE_TMP} folder and deleting it after we were done with it. Note that this situation is easily identified. If two reports fight for the same output file, you will see hung processes.

we also experienced some reports with status 'premature'.
This happened when we had a session calling a subsession to print a report (customization). We used the "activate" function to call the subsession.

We could fix the problem by changing the script and using the function "wait.and.activate".