I had a problem in 11.4 using foo2zjs for my HP LJ 1020. It was with hotplug. Printer would not print. So I uninstalled foo2zjs and installed hplip + hplip-ijs. Then I ran su -c hp-setup and it worked fine from then on.
Swerdna, when I removed the system-config-printer-udev other apps were also removed. I had added Evo, clawmail and a few other apps so I didn’t pay attention. system was microsoft’d after the reboot. had to q-parted format & reinstall. Good news though, downloaded & extracted, & installed the driver clean. now to fix the other issue. in a new post.
That sounds like a long journey.
I just had to reinstall openSUSE yesterday to get my new canon LBP6000 to work. Wouldn’t work in the old openSUSE, worked straight away in the new openSUSE. Shrug!