Collation as a saved default

It's every program I try (Safari, Firefox, Office 2008 apps, Office 2004 apps, Text Edit, Eudora, Mail, Terminal, Script Editor, iTunes) and all the printers I have (three different high-volume Xerox models, two different HP Laser Printers, and an HP DeskJet printer).

This is very frustrating. Collate, I imagine, if anything, should be the default, and instead it seems that I can't make it the saved choice for ANY of the printers/apps. Grrr.

To add:

Opening up com.apple.print.custompresets.plist in the Property List Editor, there is an option com.apple.print.PrintSettings.PMCopyCollate which is a boolean variable.

In each of my custom preset profiles, when I click on the collate check box and save the preset, it does in fact change the setting to Yes. But when I go to print the box is still not checked! So the preference IS being changed but Leopard is not following that particular preference?

To further add:

I tried creating a new account and looking at the print options there. The Standard preset has "collated" checked off, but no new preset is saved with "collated" sticking on.

So the "Standard" option on this new account has "collated" checked, but no other setting has collated checked - even if I force the Boolean to "yes" as previously described.

Okay, last one for a while:

Logging in as root, the "collated" DOES seem to work. I tried simply copying the com.apple.print.custompresets.plist from my root library to my user library, but this still doesn't work.

Actually, I can't imagine, at this point, that it's a problem with that .plist, since IT is registering the Boolean as "yes." It must be some sort of issue with how the printing is working/reading-the-preferences. Any thoughts?

Well, short of doing an install, which I am loath to do because I hate losing all of my settings and wasting hours putting them back, I'm out of ideas. The root actually is also behaving the same way as the other accounts - I just hadn't been testing it in the same way.

Newly discovered symptoms:

1) Once I've selected some printer, if I switch from Standard to some other setting and then back to Standard, the collated checkbox magically becomes checked, as does the collated checkbox on ALL other settings!

2) On Standard, if I switch to a single printer, the checkbox stays selected. However, after I switch to two or three others in succession, the checkbox magically becomes unchecked. This happens no matter what printers I switch to - I've run through enough iterations to know that it is usually after the third switch of printer.

3) After the checkbox becomes unchecked, if I switch to Standard, to something else, then to Standard again, the checkboxes (the checkbox on each preset) become checked again.

I've booted in Safe Mode, and I get the same behavior.

So, in trying various things, I was reading the instructions for an archive and install in preparation for performing one, and on a whim I opened the Print dialog in Adobe Reader. No problems there! No matter how often I changed from either printer-to-printer or preset-to-preset, the "collated" checkbox was always checked (as it should have been).

So I wanted to be thorough. After trying every program I could find on the entire computer that had a print dialog, from Terminal to Preview (specifically making sure to try some of those same files that seemed to be printable-without-collate-issues) to ChocoFlop, I found Adobe Acrobat is the ONLY program for which the Print dialog does not change to an unchecked-collate option when I change printers. Does that make sense to anyone?

Since Reader seemed to be an anomoly, I tried uninstalling Reader by hand - but I'm sure I missed files here and there. In any case, that didn't change the fact that every other program displays this issue.

I've erased an external drive and installed Leopard on it. Tomorrow I'll bring it into work to see if this fresh, pristine system install has the same issues. But can anyone think of why Adobe's Print dialog would behave properly and no other application's dialog is working?

Well, I've eliminated some possible problems:

1) it's not the security update (I did a clean install of 10.5.1 and still the same problem).

2) it's not my hardware, since I've tested it and found it repeatable on a number of other computers in the building.

3) I suppose I'm down to trying to see if the problem is still present on a different network, but the problem happens even when my wireless is off!

Now, I found that there really isn't a problem with ONLY my HP Deskjet 3320. When I switch between presets, the "collated" stays on.

So if it happens when I'm not actually connecting to the printer (no network) and it happens on all but one printer, perhaps it really must be the driver. So aha! I say to myself, hey, it's just the drivers, and the reason it's happening on all of the computers around here is that we're all adding the same printers with the same drivers. But as far as I can tell, if it really WERE a problem with the drivers, that would mean that there is an issue with drivers from Epson, HP, and Xerox - and I even downloaded new drivers straight from each of them.

I'm in the process of stumping AppleCare right now. Anyone have thoughts on this?