Excel automation: PDF export causes "Printer setup" popup

Okay, so after some research into this matter, I encountered what I believe is one of the most confuzzling things about Excel automation I have encountered so far.

The error message is consistent with other cases of Excel usage that are both automated and not. The common denominator in all these cases is (buckle up!) that a network printer was set as default printer.

That's right - having a network printer as default, even when you print using a completely different printer or no printer at all (as in the case of exporting to PDF, which is not the same as printing to e.g. Adobe PDF Printer, right?) it will cause this error to sometimes on some machines pop up.

I changed the default printer to something internal, like Microsoft XPS Document Printer, tried again and I can now export hundreds and thousands of PDFs without a single occurrence of the error message.