Ubuntu 14.04 -> VBox -> XP SP USB printer ?

[NKTower]

I am trying to help a remote friend set up Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a VM within brand new (i.e. current release) 32-bit VirtualBox, the host is XP SP3 32-bit. She's got some legacy stuff that will only run on XP, and didn't want to do dual-boot. So we went with VirtualBox. Ubuntu is running fine, we have the C: drive of the XP environment shared via vboxsp automount and can read/write to it etc. once we did the chmod +rwx on it etc.

Next task (current problem) is getting access to the two printers. They are both USB devices - an HP Color Laser and an HP B&W laser. Here are some of the things that we have tried:
1) In XP's Printers we selected each of the printers and activatd shariing. We get the 'butler's hand' under the printer icons so it appears that Windows is willing to share the printer(s).
2) In VB Manager settings for the Ubuntu VM we added USB filters. It found the two USB printers, we added them to the list.
3) We boot the VM and in the VBOX 'Devices' roll-up from the bottom we see USB and when clicked the fly-out shows the printers. If we click one we get a frozen machine. OK we thought, probably need to get some drivers in there. Couldn't shut down the VM so we did a power-cycle reset of the host.
2) We booted host and started over. We went to Ubuntu's System Settings->Printers->Add and are given several choices within Network Printing. The logical one to try was the Windows printer, but it wants Samba which isn't (currently) on the XP machine. Is that the only way to do it? Tried the usual \\hostname\printername in various of the others but none wanted to accept the \ from the keyboard. Browsing and Probing didn't work.

One thing that I didn't think to try was to have the printer's USB cable NOT plugged in, and create a wild-card filter, boot the VM machine, and then insert the printer's USB cable and see if Ubuntu will see it as "new hardware found" etc. Perhaps I've been over-complicating it?
By the way, I've had no problem going the other way - Ubuntu host with various Windows guest VMs - no problem finding printers etc. Sigh. Will check back soon. Thanks.

Thanks.

[mpack]

The best way to share printers is to access them as network shares. Do not try to access them directly as USB devices as USB assigns ownership to one PC - you can't share a printer that way.

Samba would be the correct choice. Samba is a Linux implementation of the Windows SMB sharing protocol, so naturally you won't find Samba for Windows.