How does "print to file", the part where you set your printer port to FILE, work? When you click print in a program it will save to a PRN file - what reads this? If i open it in word or anything its just a lot of unreadable rubbish! Is there a program that deals with PRN files?

What is it you are expecting? Print to file is just that - a document that has been formatted according to the printer driver being used. All that "rubbish" is how a printer is able to know where to set the margins, font type, etc throughout the document. You can take this .prn file and at a dos prompt go "copy xx.prn lpt1" and it will print the file just as if you were in Word and said print. You are smart enough to know that you would not want to send a laserjet formatted file to a inkjet. They use different formatting.

If you have a post script printer driver loaded then you could actually view the file using a post script viewer such as Ghost Viewer. Recently we had an old Windows 3.1 application that we needed to send the reports in an email. Unfortunatly the old app did not support emailing the report file. It would only print to a printer. So what I did was to setup a printer using a Post Script driver and when they would send the report to print it would prompt for a file name. Once this step was completed the file then could be emailed to anyone. The only draw back was that the receiver would need to have the ghost script file viewer installed.