…is a reasonable approach to the problem, but you need to understand how Pacifist works.

Pacifist is an application that gets inside an installer bundle to expose the various components the installer contains, so that you can pick and choose what installs. In this case, you would use Pacifist to open the original installer bundle for your generation of the OS (10.3/Panther, 10.4/Tiger, 10.5/Leopard - Pacifist only works under 10.3 and later), root around until you can find the Printer Setup Utility, and then install it alone.

http://www.charlessoft.com/

Charles Srtska just updated Pacifist at the end of October. His site has two downloads: One in the standard .dmg format, and one in .zip format for people whose DiskImageMounter application is damaged. The fact that he has this separate download suggests that trashed DiskImageMounters are pretty common, and you may also have that problem. In that case, you should use the .zip version, and when you have Pacifist working, you should also ferret out DiskImageMounter and reinstall it.

Now, where do you find these things? Pacifist has a search function, so you can find items that way. It’s likely that the filepaths are different in different generations of the OS. Here are the filepaths in 10.4. If you’re lucky, they might have the same filepaths in 10.3 and 10.5, but you’ll have to see:

Contents of OSInstall.mkpg/Contents of AdditionalEssentials.pkg/Applications/Utilities/Printer Setup Utility.app

Contents of OSInstall.mkpg/Contents of EssentialSystemSoftwareGroup/Contents of Essentials.pkg/System/Library/CoreServices/DiskImageMounter.app

Once you’ve extracted those to your desktop, you should be able to install them (or drag them to the Utilities folder) as necessary.

Now, installing components piecemeal is a lot of effort. If there are other goofball behaviors from your operating system. it’s probably a lot easier/more effective to reinstall the OS. The first thing to try is to download the relevant Combo Updater, which will update your OS to the most current version of your generation (10.3.9, 10.4.11, 10.5.1) and usually reinstalls any system applications that have gone missing. If that doesn’t work, you can reinstall the entire OS, using the Archive and Install option: Not only will it preserve your user data (docs, music, photos, mail, bookmarks, settings etc.) and any third-party applications you’ve installed, but it will reinstall all the Apple applications.

Good luck!