Lightroom 3: Edit in Photoshop CS5 no longer saves a copy as TIFF for editing

Question

Hi,
I have Lightroom 3 (LR3) and Photoshop CS5 (non Extended) and Snow  Leopard on OSX.  Both LR3 and CS5 are filly updated.  CS5 updated with  Camera Raw 6.1.
On one day, when I tell LR3 to "Edit in Photoshop" it would save a copy  of the NEF with current LR3 settings as a TIFF and I can edit it in  Photoshop as a TIFF.  I would see a progress indicator in LR3 that show  it saving a copy as a TIFF.
The next day, this stopped working.  It goes directly to Photoshop and  opens the NEF itself.   It's is completely ignoring the LR3 settings in  External Handling tab.
Strangely, when I "save" this NEF in Photoshop, a TIFF is created back in LR3.  That threw me off completely from LR2.7
Has anybody encountered this?  Does LR3 skip telling you if you want to save as TIFF now if you have the latest LR and CS?
Thank you.

Answer 1

What you describe as abnormal is how things are supposed to work:
If the RAW engines match (where LR3 and ACR 6.1 do), then LR just tells PS what the "conversion recipe" is and PS tells ACR to silently open it with that "recipe" so it doesn't have to be rendered to TIF or PSD on the way into PS. 
If the RAW engine of PS (ACR's version) is too odl to understand all the LR adjustments then LR knows this and will render to an intermediate file on the way into PS.  This also happens if you use some other third-party photo-editor that can't use ACR to open the file.
On Windows, at least, there is a way to make LR render to TIF/PSD on the way into Photoshop, I fyou create a duplicate copy of the EXE and rename it to PhotoshopX.exe or some other name that LR doesn't recognize as Photoshop, then LR thinks it is a third-party editor and renders an intermediate file.
What might have happened is that you updated to ACR 6.1 or maybe PS 12.0.1 which caused LR to re-evaluate the Photoshop compatibility and it determined it was fully compatible and didn't render to an intermediate file on the way in.
Since Photoshop is a bitmap editor, it has to save as something other than the RAW file on the way out, and LR will see that Save occur and import it automatically.
Does that all make sense?