Images look fine in Bridge, but way off when opened in Photoshop

Question

Not sure what I've done to my system, but am now having some color-management woes. I am using Photoshop and Bridge CS5.1, and for some reason, the color-management is not consistent between Bridge and PS... although it used to be until just recently. I am on a Mac Pro tower with a properly calibrated monitor (using an Eye One Pro), and all my other color-managed applications are behaving just fine, but I have this discrepancy now within Adobe where if I view an image in Bridge, it looks correct, but when I open that same image in Photoshop, it comes up way too light and desaturated. I have verified that a correct profile is embeded in each image, but this happens regardless of the source file. I have opened up grayscale images with a dot gain or gamma profile embedded, images with no profile embedded, sRGB and Adobe 1998 profiled images, and they all open up too bright. It seems like some kind of conversion must be happening, but I can't understand what that would be. Color Settings is set to preserve embedded and ask when opening for mismatches, but that's the same as it's always been on my system. I understand without a "suite" install, I cannot access the Creative Suite Color Settings dialog to sync color across multiple Adobe apps, but things have been fine for years between my PS & Bridge, so clearly I've done something wrong. It's also worth noting that RAW images in Bridge open up looking identical in the Photoshop RAW processing dialog, so somehow this is more related to TIFF, PSD & JPEG files.
I have used the Cocktail app for general system maintenance on my Mac, and in the dialog to delete old cahce files, I do recall it had an option to clear Color Sync cache (along with a bunch of other caches), so maybe that "clean up" somehow dirsupted my color matching abilities?
I was on CS5 when I noticed this problem, so I tried uninstalling that, downloading the slightly newer CS5.1 and re-installing, but the problem persists. Maybe the uninstaller app doesn't get rid of all the hidden support files, or maybe this is something else entirely? Have trashed prefs files and relaunched, still same problem.
Note how image on right is much lighter, shadows start to look posterized, colors lose saturation. Left is Bridge and Right is Photoshop. Screenshot done on calibrated monitor.
Thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

Thanks for your reply. Screenshot of my Color Settings attached. These are the same settings I've been using for many years.
What's most interesting is your reminder to look at Soft Proofing. I normally only use that when prepping an image for print, and want to predict what different paper types will "do" to my image.,, i.e. matte paper has less d-max, etc. SO, My assumption was that Soft Proofing is normally in the OFF position unless I turn it on, and/or toggle it on-off with Cmd-Y keyboard shortcut one engaged. BUT, your assessment was spot-on, in that when I opened up the View > Proof Colors dialog, it was set to Working CMYK. Not sure why, how, or when that became the default.
In all my time years with Photoshop, I've never needed to worry about soft proofing being ON without my permission, so I'm unclear how this came about. I honestly don't even know what the default has been for all the time that this was not on my radar as being a problem, I only know that when I did opt to soft proof an image, I woulp open the Proof Colors dialog, choose the appropriate device-specific paper profile to simulate, and then turn it back off when done. It would make sense to me that the default display in PS should match the (hopefully calibrated) monitor as a starting point.
Several more screenshots below, experimenting with various Proof conditions. This one is a 16-bit Grayscale image, with my usual 1.8 Gray Gamma color space embedded. This was my first experiment, not knowing what the correct default should have been (or was for many years). My assumption was that proofing the same color space as the document (G 1.8 = G 1.8), there should be no visible difference, but in fact there is. The left image is open in PS being soft proofed to it's own G 1.8 color space, and it appears visibly brighter than the same image to the right in Bridge. 
Now here's the same comparison, with Proofing set to G 2.2, which should be wrong, but visually looks like a much better match.
Next I tried a color image, with Document Profile as the proof condition. Again, the Bridge image on the right looks correct, the PS image on the left looks washed out by comparison.
Here is the same image comparison, now with Monitor RGB enabled (which pulls my current monitor profile as the device to simuulate). I'd say this is either perfect, or a much better match. This also makes sense and correlates to my suspicion that PS should be showing you things in your native monitor profile until you ask it to do otherwise with a custom soft-proofing scenario.
So now that I think I've figured it out, I leave the Monitor RGB as the device to simulate, close the image, and re-open the image just to be sure, and this is what I get...
Essentially back to the same problem. I verified that View > Proof Colors is still set to my Monitor RGB, but it's as if it's not really being applied. SO, I changed it so something else, and then changed it back, and then it looks correct... as if I somehow need to kick it and remind it to do what it's already set to do.
So, the short answer is THANK YOU for reminding me to look at the proofing setup, becasue no I at least have a kind of workaround and know where to look. The tricker part is to understand why the default doesn't really stick to the Monitor RGB (if that is even the correct place for it to stay set to), and how or why did i get off into Working CMYK in the first place, as that's not a setting I've ever used on purpose.
Thanks again,
Eric