I used mappoint to make a large 36x36" map print out using a plotter. to get some extra detail, i modified the mappoint binary to accept a higher pixel limit when generating the map image (using 'save as web page').
i used this to print out a wall (poster) size map of the entire greater portland area, including street detail. looks really nice.
MapPoint2002.exe (english version), the address is 0x0039c478. The '3500' (AC 0D) appeared in a section along with some embedded HTML strings et al. You can find the address (003AB220h?) with mappoint2004 in a similar manner.
here are my results.
[1] the map dimensions are still appear to be governed by the visible area on the screen. I used the 18mi zoom, which still rendered street data. I undocked all the tool bars, prior to that it *appeared* like i was getting more than visible area on my laptop. after fine tuning things i noticed the output exactly matched the width of what appeared on my screen (at the 18 mile zoom level) regardless of the high pixel settings. i still need to try it on another machine to see if i can get mappoint to show more data, etc. then i'll know for sure. either way, being able to set the output at 3500 (and even higher) and getting more detail is excellent!
[2] the larger the specified dimensions of the image, the more area there is for detail within the map. e.g. street names (which are a fixed font size) appear along more streets, and some vector elements of the map show more detail given more room.
[3] 3500x3500 maps looked good. the 5000x5000 was only slightly better in quality. i wouldn't fuss with the hack unless you *really* want to try different sizes and see what works best. my line printer (at 72dpi) has a 2356 pixel width, so the 3500x3500 map is still larger than the width of the 36" paper roll . I used photoshop to scale the image properly on the plotter. the 5000x5000 map will looked nice when scaled down. BUT if you can't engineer the hack, i'd say you aren't missing that much. you get the same map, but scaled (smaller) fonts, and more street names.
[4] the html pages didn't always generate properly with the larger images, however, the images generated fine.
[5] the max pixel dimensions varied -- sometimes it was 5300x5300, sometimes 5200x5200, 5100x5100,...5000x5000, etc. i'm guessing it's related to what i was trying to render. it just errors out (with a message) if it's too big - just try another setting. also interesting, i had very limited results using the hack on my desktop machine. no idea why.