Pinholes on color negs? What did I do?

[inthedark]

I have recently bought a 645Pentax and have just developed my first images, but lo and behold every so often there are pinholes (clear, no base fog nor evidence of scratch) randomly through out the film. Is this something I did? Someone here in town (who admits not knowing much about color) says he thinks he has heard stop bath can cause this, but I am not using stop bath as such. I spoke with Kodak Chem Techs and they say they don't think it is a chemical issue, maybe bad film.
I would normally accept this except that last time Kodak said it was not the processing, it turned out to be. With E6, a problem ended up being solved by switching from tap water to distilled water in the developer. Kodak originally said the problem wasn't chemical. The fellow at Kodak "says" he is also going to check with the more tenured individuals in the group, till then, anyone ever see or hear of this?

 

[inthedark]

Oh, I should mention the film is Agfa Optima 400ASA and the chemistry is Kodak c-41 industrial.

 

[Nick Zentena]

Try a couple of things.

1) Get a roll of different film. Expose and process.

2) Expose a roll of the Agfa then send it out for processing.

If it's the film then the first one should be good the second one bad. If it's you then the first one will be bad the second one good.

Supposedly a carbonate developer can cause problems with stop bath but I thought all modern films were hard enough to handle it.

 

[inthedark]

Yep, I will be breaking into another roll of film for comparison, but no one locally develops 220 and the time to mail out and back would be only a test of last resort.