That's very interesting. Your description matches exactly with that we are/were experiencing, but I believe we started getting reports of this prior to upgrading our core to 9.6. We did a huge patch deployment around mid August of 2014 (we were way behind on getting them out...long story), and then we upgraded our core to 9.6 a few weeks later, around the first part of September. I don't remember now when exactly our desktop techs started to complain about the printer issue. In hindsight, your correlation to LANDESK could definitely be valid.
We too experienced the issue with protected view, but it was affecting Office 2010 32bit running on our WinXP and Win7 endpoints, as well as a handful of Win8 endpoints (we don't have too many of those yet). One of our desktop techs identified an Office patch that seemed to affect that functionality, although we never really confirmed that was the case.