Re: Dots on expired Kodak HIE negatives?

> I recently shot two rolls of 35mm Kodak HIE that had been hibernating in my
> refrigerator for the past year-plus.  The expiration date on the boxes was
> over a year ago.  I had both rolls developed, at different times, by a good
> local photo lab.
>
> The first roll came out fine -- no problems with the film.  The second roll,
> however, had hundreds of tiny dots on each negative.  The dots are
> light/clear on the negative, and therefore produce dark dots on the positive
> images.  The dots do not have extremely well defined edges -- i.e., when I
> scan the negatives and look at the positive image in Photoshop, the dots
> "fade out" rather than abrupting stopping.
>
> Has anyone ever run into this problem before?  Could it be a result of the
> film itself going bad?  (But note that the other roll, which was just as old
> and which was stored in the same conditions, came out fine.)  Or did
> something weird happen during development?   (I've developed a lot of film
> myself, and I've never seen anything like this before.  The dots are so
> small and so numerous that I can't believe they're the result of bubbles on
> the film surface, even assuming that there was no agitation.)  I used the
> same camera (Nikon F100) and the same filter (Hoya R72) for both rolls, so I
> don't think the problem is a mechanical one.  Any thoughts about where the
> dots came from would be welcome.  I didn't lose any shots of value, but if I
> can figure out what went wrong, I can avoid the problem in the future.
> Thanks.