Well, I've had a few adventures while trying to reproduce your problem, but I'm sorry to say that I haven't managed to shed any light on this situation.

I dug out my PC and discovered that it had been infested by bugs!

Akkkkk! Bugs in my PC! Ewwwww.

Well, it wasn't all that bad, but I find it really funny that my Windows laptop is buggy. Doh! Sort of the opposite of ironic. LOL. I did some surfing to figure out what they are... turns out my PC is infested with book lice. Little white specks crawling all over my keyboard and LCD screen. So I spent yesterday afternoon trying to rid my bug infestation from the PC and my storage cabinet. I think I solved that problem anyway, but here is what happened when I tried to reproduce yours:

I re-downloaded the 6.91 distribution and used it to write some IPTC information. No problem. Then I deleted inc/lib/Image/ExifTool/WritePhotoshop.pl from the temporary par directory... Still no problem. It turns out that the WritePhotoshop.pl file that is used is actually called 142cebc5.pm (odd I know, but then I don't claim to know the inner workings of the PAR module). Anyway, when I erased that file and tried again it was just re-extracted automatically and everything worked fine again. The only way I was able to break it was to specifically corrupt this file, but then I got a different error message. I was not able to do anything to generate the error you got.

So it is still a mystery, and all I can do is hope that 6.92 works for you when it is released later in the week.

- Phil