I have spent all night to figure this out and this is the conclusion I come to:
To share a printer between two Windows boxes (regardless of if they are virtual or physical) a Homegroup needs to be established between the two boxes.
I tried the suggested route from above link first but there are many requisites for this to work, basically for this to work the host has to be wide-open to obvious attacks etc.
For the Homegroup to work the network adapter location setting has to be set to Home instead of Work or Public and the Windows Firewall service has to be set to automatic as well.
First of all I have Windows Firewall service turned off as well as the DNS client due to a rather large HOSTS file, also I rely on a software firewall that suits my needs 100%, being able to close all the ports and only allow connections I really need for browsing and email.
Then my network location, for security purposes as well, has always and will always be set to Public, even at home. From the Windows help notes is says: If you know you won’t need to share files or printers, the safest choice is public network.
Last, I don't want the two boxes to be on the same Homegroup, nor do I ever want to be on any Homegroup. This is also due to security concerns.
Yes of course there are tons or backdoors etc for the Windows OS to break in despite such settings, but with closing all the important ports (NetBIOS etc, 137, 138, 139, & tons more etc) and only allowing outside connections of the host through very restrictive rules and only through a VPN the windows host can be made somewhat secure, with emphasis on "somewhat".
All this leads me to the point where, out of fun and for trying out if this works, I set all above conditions to "open-wide-homegroup-windows-firewall-automatic-sharing-printer" and it did work. However given all the loss of security this brings with it I cannot choose this option, at least not for this host.
What does this leave me with?
1. Rely on help from the VirtualBox forum members to get true USB printer sharing/USB pipe going, without connecting the guest to the host through a network. I am fine with Host-only if must be, however all other above mentioned Windows file and printer/homegroup/sharing options are out of the question.
2. Since I do not want Office or Acrobat (Adobe Acrobat especially is detested with a passion here) installed on the host I would have to reply on, for example SumatraPDF to print PDFs and some VBscript/C# to get Office 2013 Word, Excel & Powerpoint files printed after doing work with them on the guest and saving them in a designated sandboxed and av-scanned shared folder.
For option 1 I think
http://askubuntu.com/questions/48982/ho ... ose-win-xp is pretty important regardless of the guest and host OS, I think the issue is that the Windows user group is not the same for the USB printer, or at least it should be vboxusers, though I have no idea is this is up to date info (3 years old) and if this would work.
To sum all this up I make an honest plea to the users that got their USB printer to work through VirtualBox USB sharing, with the USB filer setting, to come forward and let myself and other users in need how they have accomplished this task.
If there are none such users I would suggest that this feature of VirtualBox is not working or at least not with version 4.2.16 86992-Win since I have really really tried everything else.
More than happy about any suggestions on points 1. or 2. though I would LOVE to learn how to really get VirtualBox USB sharing/pipe working on a Win host Win guest setup.
Thank you
