Printing over a VPN

If I understand you correctly, it sounds like your vendor has it set up as a network printer pointing back to a local machine on your local network that is sharing the printer out. In that case your local machine on your LAN is the one hosting the print spooler.

Does this printer have its own network connection and IP address on your LAN? If so, then try having the vendor set it up as a local printer on their machine, connected to a standard TCP-IP port pointing to the printer's IP address. That way, the print spooler is local to the vendor's machine and spooling will not be affected by the VPN connection. Once the document is spooled, then it will send the print job to the printer via tcp-ip which, because it is at a lower layer, is a lot more resilient than trying to print to a remote spool over a saturated link (network printing is at the highest layer-application).

If I misunderstood and that's how it IS set up, then try it the other way; set it up as a printer on one of your machines and share it out to the vendor; s/he would then install it as a network printer.

The only spooler settings I am aware of are those available in the printer properties' Advanced tab.

Printer is not shared, Prints back to a socket (ip, port).
Seems to work fine as long as vendor does not have a full staff or prints off hours.

Make sure that the spooling in the print driver>advanced tab is set to "start printing after last page has spooled"
Disabling "advanced printer functions" (MS EMF spooling) may reduce spool file size.

In the ports tab, disable bidirectional communication, and in the port config disable SNMP.

These settings will all reduce timeouts, and ensure that jobs are not truncated, which can  lock the spooler.
If possible, reduce the print resolution.

Some printers support FTP printing, which with the right FTP client, supports resuming paused jobs.

If the printer has a hard disk, enable print spooling to the hard disk (some printers without a hard disk have a RAM disk capability that can be enabled), and check the buffer and timeout settings on the printer, if available, increase both.

All the options are set like you mentioned.  What I am really looking for is a method configuring the printer to just keep trying and less time between retries.  Right now it’s hard to trend, but it seems like it will retry after about 5 mins, and then timeout.

What make/model of printer?
Are you using raw or lpr prinitng?
IPP may be a better option if the printer supports it.

Printing is RAW, printer is an application that listens on a port and captures print jobs printed in text.
This issue is with network traffic, I need the spooler in the user’s PC to retry more often, not just fail.

Can anyone tell me how to configure the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Spooler\performance.failureactions

I am hoping this hold the behavior of the spooler ?

Might have saved some time if you had mentioned that it isn't a physical printer, that changes the scenario completely.

Why would that change anything, the problem is with the printing spooler on the PC.  I am trying to figure out how to chg the params.

Because a physical printer can have extra parameters changed to make connections more reliable, and the application listening may have similar options, but they will need to be adjusted differently.
The problem is not just with the spooler, but the lack of bandwidth, and that will need changes at both ends.
The spooler is probably giving up after a partial transfer. Changing retry timing  will probably not cure that.
Does the VPN setup have any QOS settings?

If it does, I can not get at Network equipment.

I am just looking for a way to adjust the params on the print spooler.

We may not agree on the solution, but if you know how to configure the timeout and/or Error behavior of the print spooler of the workstations and could share that with me,  I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks