For the past couple of weeks I've been making prints every three-to-four days, getting things ready for the holiday season, preparing smaller pieces for local galleries. Nothing interesting to report; when used with some regularity the printer has exhibited zero ink-delivery (clogging) problems.
Having a little time on my hands last evening, I installed the new Mac driver, described in my last posting, for the 7900. I installed simply by running the installer package, which means the new driver installed "over" the previous version (9.04). I've done this with earlier versions without issue. There's nothing on Epson's drivers page to indicate this is a bad (or good) idea. Perhaps, this time, not so good.
Although the Mac almost never requires a reboot, after the driver installed I rebooted. I then launched Photoshop CS6 (I haven't drunk the CC Kool-aid yet, but likely will before the end of the year). I opened a random jpeg and printed. I'd no intention of printing that file; I simply wanted to have a look at the PS print set-up dialog to see if there were obvious changes. There were:
I found garbage characters in the labels (captions) for many of the drop-down lists, and unpopulated (blank) drop-downs. Most of the drop-down lists for things like selecting a profile, setting the paper size, etc. didn't respond to mouse clicks. And then Photoshop crashed (exited). The OS wanted to let Apple know about it, and then an Adobe dialog wanted to let Adobe know.
I rebooted, repeated the test, this time with a .psd instead of a jpeg. Same result.
To resolve the problem, I removed the printer from OS X's printers control panel. I then followed Epson's instructions (posted on the driver page) to remove the driver. After rebooting, I ran the same installer package that started this mess. Printing has worked perfectly since. No odd behavior, and no obvious differences, beyond the displayed driver version number.
This wasn't a terrible hassle, but it took a bit of my time to sort out. Since I've still no clue what changes version 9.17 introduces over 9.04, I may have been better off doing nothing, keeping the older version. Your experience may be different (better, I hope).
For the record: 2008 Mac Pro (3,1) with dual quad-core 2.8 GHz processors, OS X 10.8.5. Photoshop CS6 with all updates. The 7900 has the latest firmware.
--Jay
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