Gerald wrote:

[...] Now, presumably Xpdf printing to LPR invokes Ghostscript and Turboprint just like Acrobat does, so why does Xpdf manage to print the document when Acrobat can't??

Because they're completely different implementations of rendering PDFs. XPDF does its own decoding to Postscript, while it sounds like Acrobat is just passing the PDF to lpr, which usually calls Ghostscript.

Unfortunately, Xpdf cannot print only odd or even pages (which I need)

[...]

Print to Postscript and use psselect from pstools.

If anyone can suggest a cure for this very frustrating problem, I'd be delighted - and VERY grateful!

Don't use PDF. ghostscript, xpdf and acroread have different problems with them ;-)