Sharing a network printer, which method is preferable?

It all depends on what kind of car will manage the print queue in the machine where you created the port, in the second, the PrintServer machine (i.e. the printer). I'm not sure that in the first embodiment, generally the printer will be available to multiple users, and the second indefinitely.

Because the domain is already 2008 (I hope it's not the server, namely the level of forest/domain) — I suggest to use Group Policy Preferences to do this. In group policies in the branch "User configuration" in the GUI you can very easy to add printers of all stripes. The only caveat is that on a customers XP|Vista NoSP|2003 will need to deliver Group Policy Preferences Client Extensions (GPP CSE). Although generally the infrastructure level 2003 worked fine option No. 2, with the vbs script. The more that you have a print server and all enterprisename.