Comment 3 for bug 43059

According to the initial report this is not a bug in system-config-printer-kde but really in kdebase. The network scanning facility mentioned is a part of the KDE Printing Manager. system-config-printer (both KDE and GNOME) asks CUPS for available printers and so the CUPS backends do the network scan in a much faster and efficient way (via SNMP and Bonjour/Zeroconf) and they find always the LAN and do not get stuck in the loopback device.

The KDE Printing Manager is not maintained any more upstream and removed from KDE 4.x on, so it does not appear any more in Intrepid. Therefore we will not do any usability improvements on this software any more.

system-config-printer (at least the GTK/GNOME version) turned to be a de-facto standard. It is currently used in Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat, and Mandriva Linux. So the latest and greatest in terms of printer management and GUI for new CUPS-internal functionality usually goes into system-config-printer and therefore this is the recommended printer setup tool.