I apologise for belabouring the obvious, but you have installed the latest Epson drivers, haven't you? I mean the recent Apple update Epson Printer Drivers v2.9 OS X. But, of course, if you synch your laptop with your desktop, then all bets are off.

If using a different account and/or the laptop satisfies this condition, then the problem lies elsewhere. The point of using a new user account - which is brand new with default settings - is to make sure that none of the old, incompatible, or corrupt prefs and caches in the user domain are causing the problem. Tried the laptop with 10.6.8 and ended up with the same result I did try using a different user account and got the same behavior.