Digital BW, The Print

All,

I've recently been printing black and whites thru PShop using an Epson 
7800 and the ABW mode. Prints like a jewel, VERY linear with Hahnemuehle 
Fine Art Pearl. But in the Printer color management page, the default 
for TONE is "Darker". Can anyone give me a plausible reason why? It 
definitely does print darker if I forget to switch it back to NORMAL 
which is 2 steps back in density. Thrown away 2 prints so far because of 
it. The only thing I can think of is that the sales people got in there 
and left this "land mine" to make the users screw up and use up more ink 
and paper than they need to. Any thoughts about this? I've been trained 
over the years to never trust using a PRESET as they revert to default 
settings seemingly randomly. Is this a Mac thing or does this sort of 
thing happen on Windows too?

Will Gibson