Thank you all for your responses. I might be in a different situation than I thought. I've gone through all the process looking for this device in open devices and I didn't find it, but any time I try to open the device it fails.
Is it possible for a device to get stuck open and cause the behavior I'm seeing?
Is that the OS of the server with the printer on it, or the one with the database installed?
It's windows server 1012, the open command is O X::0, where X is the name of the device being opened
Yeah that's right about the format of X. When I try printing to that device from my test server it prints works fine. That's what made me think something is going on with my cache environment, or possibly something at the OS level like Dmitry mentioned.
I'm still not sure exactly how a device got stuck open like this, but after resetting the server the issue went way. It seems like there ought to be a way to monitor this sort of thing happening in windows, but it's a simple enough fix if you think this might be happening.