I have to agree with suzanne.
I understand and sympathize with your concern, but there had to be something else working to "save printer settings". Is it possible you had some sort of special addin (I haven't heard of any that do this, but ...) that somehow saved printer settings for you?
An addin that was NOT upgraded to 2013. Maybe a utility from your network printer company or the printer company?
My 20+ years experiece using Word has been that it has NEVER "saved" settings. As a matter of fact, when my employer forced me to use Word in place of the much better WordPerfect for DOS, that was one of my (many) pet peeves. WP DID save printer settings
in the document. MS explicitly designed Windows to take control of Printers and printer settings away from the applications and files.
Sorry. the only way I know of that settings could be saved in Word and Windows is via macros.
One way I have simulated "saving settings" has been to define more than one logical printer pointing to the same physical printer if I wanted to partially automate things like printing 2-sided vs 1-sided, or telling it to use a special tray for first page and
any other printer (driver) specific setting.
ie Boss HP printer 2-sided
Boss HP printer 1-sided
Secretary printer letterhead drawer ....
Secretary printer plain