Interesting Glitch Between Photoshop CS 3 and Network Printer Drivers

I use Dreamweaver far more than Photoshop. Beyond resizing and/or optimizing the occasional graphic for websites, the rest of my job doesn't require much image editing.  I'm a developer, not a designer-- or at least, that is how it was until recently.  This week, I found myself faced with converting a design comp into a bare bones Dreamweaver template and ran face-first into a glitch with Photoshop CS 3 for Windows.

Resizing or optimizing a single graphic for a page usually means I have only one file open at a time. But the workflow for slicing up a reference graphic into regions of a webpage is different; you'll probably select and copy a piece (e.g. the header, the footer, the sidebar, etc.) and create a new, separate file for each segment.  You can imagine my surprise when I create a new/second image, and Photoshop crashes completely with this cryptic error message: The instruction at "0x7c91b21a" referenced memory at "0x00000010." The memory could not be "written." 



After reading through the results of multiple Google searches, I made an interesting (for me, at least) discovery.  If you use Photoshop CS3 (for Windows, version 10.0.1 with all available updates) and your default printer is a network printer, there is a decent chance that opening or creating a second file will cause Photoshop to crash. This is actually an old issue (since at least 2007), but there's a quick and easy workaround-- just set your default printer to either a local or "virtual" printer and the symptom goes away.  I changed my default printer from a networked Ricoh Aficio MP 9000 to "Adobe PDF" and confirmed that I was suddenly able to open or create multiple image files without issue.  Thanks to the patrons over at the Adobe User Forum, particularly Anders, for coming up with this workaround.  It gave me what I needed to get my job done on time.

Naturally, this workaround doesn't sit well with some people.  They figure Photoshop is an expensive commercial image editing package and Adobe should create a patch to resolve this issue. I understand their disappointment and anger.  There's just one small problem-- the issue is not being caused by Adobe Photoshop, but rather by some printer drivers.

After searching Ricoh's support site, I discovered a recently revised driver (August 24, 2010!) for the Ricoh Aficio MP 9000 called the "PCL6 Driver for Universal Print."  I replaced my existing, unsigned Ricoh printer driver with this new, Windows-signed driver, set my default printer back to the networked Ricoh printer, and put Photoshop through the paces of creating and opening multiple files.  So far, this change in printer drivers seems to have resolved the issue-- allowing me to open or create multiple files in Photoshop while having a network printer set as my default printer. Guess that makes a decent argument for the importance of using signed drivers.