New information: Illustrator 7.0 can also generate bad BeginData/EndData sections with bad byte counts. The fixill.pl script (below) has been updated to fix these too. These files will cause dvips 5.90 problems, but I hope to fix this problem too somehow. Illustrator versions 8.0 and 9.0 generate invalid DSC at the top of their files, and this causes dvips to reject these files when comment elision (-K) is turned on. Essentially, the byte count in the hex thumbnail section is flagrantly incorrect.

I have prepared a detailed bug report with associated data files.

I am testing a patch to dvips that works around this problem for the next release of dvips. If you want you can try using patch to dvips 5.86e.

If you have broken EPSF files, I have written a Perl script that may fix them. It is available here, or, if your system insists on executing scripts with the PL extension, you can also get it here as text.