Long Prints-PS and Epson7600

Question

I realize this may not be the proper forum for posting this question, but I will give it a try regardless.  Obviously it's up to the group to either answer or not, and I will leave it at that.  I have posted this question on the Epson Wide Format Forum with results, so I'm hoping you might be able to offer a bit of advice, since the OS does have a bearing on this issue.  I will admit that I have seen this question here a couple of times without much of a response.
The issue is the printing of an image longer than the 90.5" restriction of the Epson 7600 drivers.  Of course, as with any printer driver, some of the driver parts reside within the OS as well as the driver itself.  One of the last responses I received on the Epson forum was that in CS3 and CS4 the image length restriction had been lifted and the poster mentioned that he had printed several images considerably longer than 90.5".  I have been working with these printers for over 4 years and have not been able to find a way around this restriction.  He also mentioned that he is working with the Epson 7600 driver version 3.09 installed on OS 10.4.x.  On the Epson site this driver version is specifically mentioned for use with Leopard only.  I did however install version 3.09 on one of my bootable Tiger drives to try it out.  As I had suspected, it did not work, so I have since taken that drive back to it's original state as a backup for my OS and apps.  I also have one drive with Leopard installed and the 3.09 driver, but it won't print beyond the aforementioned length either.
Of course it's quite possible that I have overlooked something and that there is indeed a way to circumvent the length restriction on the 7600.  If any of you good folks have information that might help I would certainly appreciate your response.  I am running a Power Mac G5 with OS X 10.4.11 and two Epson 7600 printers.  They are working just fine, but I have noticed that Lepoard tends to interpret my printer profiles somewhat differently(NOT in a good way) than in Tiger.  For this and other reasons I doubt I will be taking the full leap to Leopard any time soon.
Thanks in advance for any information you feel might be of help.
Gary

Answer 1

I think I figured it out.  I took another crack at it tonight, starting with a full printer deletion.  I removed all of my printers, and deleted all signs of Epson on my computer.  I even went so far as to delete the icc profiles in my ColorSync directory.  Then I reinstalled everything.  I don't know if this helped or not, but what I did find out is that I will never enable 16-bit printing in the driver again.  It turns out there are two places where you can check a box enabling 16-bit printing.  One is in PS/LR, the other is in the Printer Settings dialog.  Right next to where you disable printer color management in that dialog is a 16-bit button.  I'm guessing that even if you disable printer color management in the driver, this button, when checked, enables all or a part of the printer color management operation again.  So if you have PS/LR set to color manage, and the driver set to do nothing, turning on this option can result in a conflict between PS/LR and the driver.  That's my theory anyway.  All I know is that as long as that box remains unchecked (even if 16-bit is enabled in PS/LR) everything works fine.  I'd love to hear from those more knowledgable than me if my theory makes any sense.
Thanks for all of the help and suggestions.  Chris, you were dead right that the problem was in the driver.  I'm going to close the loop with Epson product support anyway just to see if I can confirm my suspicions.
Dave