many thanks to all for your consideration
problem solved
(from my email to Roy Harrington)
As I woke up this morning, I also suspected that the wrong
PPD file was selected by the QTRgui. That proved to be the
case. QTRgui is a bit skitterish with the dropdowns on my Win 7
pro. I have very fast 6 core processor and sometime older
code doesn't expect to handle events as fast as these
new machines can produce them.
Often the dropdowns don't work at all and I have to restart
the gui.
I did select the R3000 ppd but it got changed to some other
random one as I closed the dropdown.
Also thanks for the inkseparation8.tif file. You don't need
to worry about the windows distribution because the 8 head
version is the default named inkseparation.tif along with 3
others for 6, 7 and 10 heads.
So problem solved. I'm on to follow your advice on the 2880
and continue my evaluation of QuadTone RIP.
again many thanks