I did a bare 9.0 install and then updated to slackware-current and all is working well except printer setup under the kde print wizard. I have cups 1.1.19 and the gimp-print drivers installed along with the foomatic filters.
Looking at dmesg I do not see that cups is starting.

I have tried to /etc/rc.d/rc.cups restart as root and get the error message that permission is denied.

Looking at permissions for rc.cups I have rw-r--r--. Shouldn't this be executable in order for rc.M to start the print spooling system?

Added info. From the current changelog
+--------------------------+
Mon Aug 25 19:56:00 PDT 2003
isolinux/initrd.img, rootdisks/install.*: Support more than one installation
disc. In expert or menu mode, run all the menus for each disc, and then
go on to install the packages from that disc. Various other bugfixes.
a/cups-1.1.19-i486-3.tgz: chmod 644 /etc/rc.d/rc.cups.new so that CUPS
will not run on a default installation until the admin changes the perms.
a/infozip-5.50-i486-2.tgz: Fixed a bug where a specially crafted archive
might try to write to ../ or ../../, etc, potentially overwriting system

What are the recommended perms?

Any help appreciated

do chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.cups

Because rc.cups is a startup script should root executable permissions be enough or will this prevent me from using cups as a user?

You may have a point there. I'm not positive, but what you say makes sense. I did the chmod +x because if you look at some of the other scripts in /etc/rc.d that are executable by default, such as rc.inet1 and 2, you'll see that the permissions are -rwxr-xr-x. That's why I say chmod +x.

Not sure this is real secure but I looked at an 9.0 system and the permissions of rc.cups were -rwxr-xr-x (chmod 755) and that allowed the cups server to load and subsequently setup.