I have 13 computers in house, lots of different video cards, Win XP, Win Vista, and 1 MacBook Pro lap. Bridge CS3 just does not work right. Thumbnail issues, applying the correct color to the white balanced RAW files, very slow performance.
I have tried all the fixes. I have updated all the Adobe apps to the latest versions, even reinstalled all Adobe apps, tried the cache clearing, increasing cache size, export cache to folder options, removing all preferences in Bridge CS3 on start, tried software rendering options, high-quality preview options, high quality thumbnail options, and startup script options. Still Bridge is just broken.
Bridge CS2 still works great, unfortunately I mostly use a Nikon D300 - which requires Camera Raw 4.x in Adobe Photoshop CS3. I clearly like the NEF raw files and don't really want to convert to DNG just to use Bridge CS2. I'm guessing that Nikon will be around for a while to support NEF files.
The only thing that seems common on the computers (Win and Mac) that have bad Bridge CS3 problems in that each has an NVIDIA video card. Interestingly, the older computers that seem to work better have some older ATI cards - although they have problems, just fewer and less problematic. The problems are far worse when viewing a folder of D300 raw files?
Adobe does not seem at all interested in either acknowledging this problem or solving this problem that almost all users seem to have.
Any new ideas or solutions out there??
*** UPDATE***
I opened the NVIDIA website and downloaded the automatic 'seach for new driver' applet. The automated applet actually recommended a driver from December 2007 - and not the newer versions. The recommended driver downloaded, I uninstalled the old drive, then restarted and installed the new recommended driver.
On restart, the color and performance of the new driver was better and faster. I then re profiled both monitors. One monitor, the Dell 24 inch Ultrasharp allows calibration with the Eye One Display 2 software (3.6), and the calibration steps showed completely different R G B settings than just a hour earlier with the old driver installed. After both monitors were re profiled, the performance in Bridge CS3 was completely corrected. The color of the raw thumbnails on both monitors (I opened 2 Bridge CS3 windows, one on each screen) were completely identical. This problem is solved on this one computer.
I am off to see if the NVIDIA website can solve the other Bridge CS3 problems, on my other computers, I have been having - I am guessing that it will.
I was completely wrong on my original posting. This was a NVIDIA driver issue and not an Adobe issue. My bad!
