If you're like me, you do a lot of drag-and-drop from Bridge and/or Mini-Bridge into InDesign layouts. It's one of those features that relegates sliced bread to a historical also-ran. But… a couple months ago I collided, quite by accident, with a serious bug in Bridge's processing of certain EPS files. If you run into it, you might not know what the heck is going wrong, and I just verified that it is NOT fixed in the latest 4.04 update to Bridge CS5, so here's the issue:
A small percentage of older EPS files, the kind you might get from a stock site, or as legacy art from some old steam-age project, lock up Bridge's preview extraction. What you'll see, if you're looking for it, is that any new file (that doesn't already have a thumbnail cached) in that folder will remain a gray box in the Bridge window, and the little status bar way down at the bottom of the window will keep spinning its wheels forever.The first of those gray boxes will be the problem EPS.
Navigating away from the folder doesn't clear the problem. Bridge just keeps banging its head against the maverick EPS. If you have a performance widget/gadget running, you'll see CPU usage climb to a much higher than expected number.
It only takes one of these in a folder to get Bridge all tied in a knot, so you might not even notice there's a problem until 10 minutes later. What's worse (at least on the Windows platform — I've not tested in OS X), quitting Bridge doesn't work either. In fact, it makes things worse: the CPU maxes out, and the Bridge process keeps running after it has “quit.” You have to kill the process in task manager. The same parsing bug exists in Bridge CS4, but Bridge CS4 does quit properly when closed.
The workaround, if you run into this, is to navigate to the folder in Explorer or Finder, open the EPS in Illustrator and save as an IA file, or an Illustrator CS(x) EPS.
Adobe QE verified the problem and reported they could reproduce it two months ago, so I don't know why the new update didn't fix it. Perhaps next time. As David would undoubtedly point out, it's yet another reason to move on from EPS completely.
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