With a little help from some other folks programming with flex, I figured out the issue with printing from my flex viewer. It turns out if I commented out the following code (this.removeChild(printBox)) in the catch error section of the printwidget.mxml so that it just shows an alert, I got the real error message. There is something wrong with the wms service we are brining in to the viewer to display precipitation data. It is not working properly. If I remove that service from the config file, the print widget works just fine. Go figure.
Thanks,
Alison