Here is how we can solve this for the release.
Bulia, the new standard Windows dialog was implemented by Kees in Nov/Dec/Jan in r16655, r16860, r16865, r16866 (and maybe a couple others I missed.) Please test reverting these and prepare a patch-set which removes the new print system and restores the old one. Post this patch to bug 179988 and assign it to Ishmal. Please get this done and tested as soon as possible (today or tomorrow preferrably). Hopefully it should not take very long.
Kees, please let Bulia know of anything special that may help him with making this patch, or if you have ideas for a better workaround. If you could clarify which patches need reverted, that could help immensely.
Ishmal, please include this patch in the Windows package. I don't know if you have a deb/rpm-style patching system, but if not, just go ahead and patch source. From your research, it sounds like this will be fixed with the cairo 1.6 release; I asked cworth about a release date for this, and he said it should be within a few weeks, perhaps less, so we probably won't need to carry this reversion patch for very long.
If we can get this reversion patch by tomorrow, then we can avoid dealing with the question of whether to delay, release without windows, etc. etc. It's good to see all the discussion around this (and I'll post my own thoughts later), but at this point what we need first is a patch.
Bryce
P.S., while for Windows it may not an availability issue, it *IS* going to be an availability issue for Linux if we miss the Fedora 9 and Ubuntu Hardy deadlines. Shipping rc's or 0.45.1 in those, when we're so close now, would be embarrassing.