Impossible to get ACR showing the same colors as in Bridge

Question

Hello,
Usually my .NEF files (shot with a D90) appears with quite soft colors and contrast in Bridge. However, since yesterday, as soon as I use the magnifier (in the filmstrip mode) or open a .NEF file with ACR, the colors are warming up. I must have done something wrong and changed some settings, but I can't find what it is. Even if I leave the white balance on "as shot", and try all the camera profiles available (ACR 4.6, Adobe Standard, Camera D2X mode1, 2, 3, Camera Neutral,...), I can't get ACR showing the same colors as my preview in Bridge. I also tried the "reset camera raw defaults" function, didn't help either.
I guess that if I have the same problem when I use the magnifier in Bridge without opening the file in ACR, it is because ACR still takes action to load the full image, isn't it? 
Thanks for your help,
Sam

Answer 1

Thanks for your answer. I'll reply point by point.
My monitors are calibrated, and I did it recently. But this is not the problem here since I can see the colors changing live on the monitor when I activate the magnifier: I click somewhere on the image with the magnifier, it takes a few seconds to load the 100% section of the image and then the colors are changing on the whole image (not only the enlarged section). Similarly, when I open the image in ACR, I can still simultaneously see the Bridge version of the image on the same monitor and they have different colors. So this shouldn't be a monitor problem.
My color settings in Photoshop (Edit>Color settings) are set on sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and set on "preserve embedded profiles". But I don't get that point, does the color setting in PS affect the colors in Brigde and ACR when PS is not open?
Bridge preferences: What would be useful to know, there are many preferences?! Here are a few that might be of some help: Cache: all unchecked; Advanced: all unchecked; Output: "convert multi-byte..." and "preserve embedded color profile" are checked
ACR preferences: all unchecked except "apply auto grayscale mix when converting to grayscale"
I didn't know how Bridge and ACR were working. But I don't understand what could have changed over the couple of days since before that, the pictures open in ACR (or zoomed in in Bridge) did look exactly the same as the preview. If none of PS, ACR or Bridge are set to apply some color corrections, where do they get this information from?
Sorry, I forgot to give the details about the softwares. I'm using CS4 (PS 11.0.2, Bridge 3.0.0.464, ACR: 5.7.0.213) on a MacOS 10.5.8.
I didn't know how to trash the Bridge preferences, so I did it and... that worked! Colors are not changing anymore. But what could it have been, how is this resetting different from the "reset camera raw defaults" function for example?
Thanks for your input, it did solve my problem. I still don't understand the few things described above though, so if you have a few minutes, it would be great if you could explain them to me.