Thanks, OldToad. Good to hear from you again. That's a great suggestion. I use Macs, and have fiddled with Automator in the past, but I can't recall what I used it for. I use PDFCandy to do all sorts of things with PDFs, and I know it can convert them to PNG easily, albeit not in batches. For paper documents that I have no choice but to scan, I can simply choose PNG as the output format.

For now I'm going to sit tight at least until the middle of February to see whether they fix this with the next update. In November they told some of us that this goofball PDF behavior was intentional too, but then it was fixed in December. I too fear that the PNG functionality might be temporary, so I'm not going to spend time just yet converting my accumulating PDFs to PNG.