NT making print spooler files HUGE!!

[sps]

I just switched out some Windows 98 workstations at work for some with Win NT. Files (large raster images) that printed ok in Win 98 are blowing up in the spooler in Win NT to hundreds of megs (they were maybe 50 megs in the spooler in 98. Does anybody know what causes this or how I can get by it? Plots are taking forever to come out and they came out relatively fast on older machines with Win 98!

 

[FirmPete]

What service pack are you running?
What printer/plotter are you using?

 

[sps]

I'm running SP6a on some machines and SP5 on others. I'm having the problem on a HP DesignJet 455CA, HP DeskJet 1220, HP LJ 5si, and HP LJ 8000N. It seems to be regardless of specific hardware of specific NT installation (I have the same problem on Dells w/ NT and HPs with NT). I was on the phone with HP for 3 hours and they came up empty handed (they wanted to find something to do with the Jet Direct cards in the printers or the printers themselves or the workstation hardware that was causing the problem). As far as I'm concerned though, the problem is obvious. It has something to do with how NT processes these files as it plots them. I have a 2MB .pdf file of a USGS topo map that swells to 261MB within the NT spooler when I plot it at 24x36". Any .pdf file consisting of a raster image (usually a b/w aerial photo or a USGS topo) has this same problem. I also get the same problem when printing aerials or topos within ESRI ArcView GIS or AutoCAD 2000 or R14 so it's not just Adobe Acrobat. Any ideas?