Brother HL1240 printing pages withouth text (white-on-white?)

Hi,
Recently I had to reinstall the OS (w2k) on my home machine, and, after
that the printer driver from the manufacturer's CD for the Brother
Hl-1240 laser printer. Driver installation proceeds fine, printing of
the test page goes well too.

However, when trying to print a page (any web page) from browser
(Firefox), mail (Thunderbird) or an office application (e.g. MS Word,
also OpenOffice Writer), the printed page does not print the text at
all: only the images (if present on the page) are printed (properly),
the page layout appears to be preserved, but there is no text. It almost
looks like it is printing white-on-white text? Some pages have parts of
certain textual lines underlined (sure, again no text at all).

I checked the printer's settings, the application settings, etc, but
there is nowhere a checkbox or parameter that looks like relating to
this problem.

Didi anyone had a similar experience? Do you have any ideas what to try
to fix this?

Thanks,
John