Are they really high, or in a floating state that appears high?
Actually, your definition is a bit loose. During startup, the BIOS and then
windows usually send one or more printer reset commands to the parallel
port. Obviously the first thing would be to modify BIOS. Why is this a
problem? The parallel port mode may make a difference.
Remember that there are three states for the outputs-- High, Low, and
tristate(floating)
Originally the parallel port outputs were pulled up. Thus that configuration
by default would likely have high as the default.