P: Completely broken Hand tool (PS24.5) Hand Tool Sticking, sticky, not seeing mouse-up

@CJButler @Dramenon  I think I might have finally come up with a reproducable clue for you. As this stickiness also happens with the marquee selection tool, I spent some time this morning trying to rigorously figure out exactly what series of events caused the "sticky" to happen. Turns out it's the same for the pan/hand tool but that's harder to reproduce.

With the marquee tool, if I do this:

Click and hold left mouse. Drag. Stop moving the mouse. Unclick left mouse while the mouse is stationery. Then it never, ever sticks. I get the marquee selection and it works as I'd expect.

However, 9 times out of 10, if I do this:

Click and hold left mouse. Drag. Unclick while dragging.  Then it sticks and the marquee tool follows the mouse until I click the left button again.

For the pan/hand tool, it's a similar series of events. If I always let the left mouse button go while the mouse is stationary, then the pan/hand tool works perfectly. (Hold space, click and hold, drag mouse, unclick, let go of space) But again, 9 times out of 10, if I'm click-move-click-move panning, so the mouse is always in motion, it sticks.(hold space, click and hold, drag mouse and while it's moving, unclick to move back and re-click - ie. for panning across large or very zoom-in images)

The common event for me is the movement of the mouse. If the mouse is not moving when I let go of the mouse button (unclick), all the tools work exactly as they should. But if the mouse is moving, it starts to get this weird sticky behaviour. I did for a while thing there was a speed element involved and true - at slower mouse speeds it's harder to reproduce - but again - the common thing is mouse movement. Almost like you've got some sort of buffer overflow going on where the mouse movement is overwhelming the buffer with so much data that the button-up event gets missed.

Hope this helps? While a definite "not" condition isn't ideal ("it doesn't happen when..."), it might clue you in to where to look in the mouse handler.

I also suffer from this issue--and it's 100% maddening!  I keep hoping that it gets fixed. 

I'm a software developer, so I can 100% sympathize with your perdicament and can relate to situations where events don't raise back from the OS like they're supposed to.  Normally, for my apps, this happens when the mouse travels outside of the object that initiated the mousedown event.  For example, if your application were to pop up a new layer/panel/object (I don't know the specifics of how your app is structured), that new panel/layer/object could hijack the mouse events so the original object never gets it.  I've also seen this when I have objects tracking the mouse location in the application. If the object tracking the mouse isn't 100% perfectly in sync, I've seen it stop registering the mouse events because of how Windows likes to automatically give focus to whatever is directly underneath the cursor.  That all could have ZERO bearing on how you guys have PS structured (my windows applications are all written with the Microsoft .NET Framework as a foundation, which I'm positive isn't the case with PS), but maybe it will give your devs some additional things to look into?  Just trying to help..

Ya know, after finding out about this possibly being caused by a mouse up Windows HWND event issue, I'm wondering if it could be related to another issue that I reported a while back that I still run into (albeit not QUITE that often these days, thank God!)  Although in that issue's case, PS is still registering the mouse movements off-canvas and when you click the mouse (or pen stylus) on the canvas, all the mouse movements you've done since the last click happen all at one time.  Not quite the same thing, but I'd be willing to bet money that there's at least SOME kind of connection there!

The issue I reported is here (includes a link to a video demonstrating the problem happening):

Mouse/Cursor captures off-canvas clicks (occasional/not-reproducible/restart necessary)

I spent time on the break setting up my Windows systen to reproduce this problem and I have... I am actively pursuing the issue with engineering. 

@CJButler Hopefully, we are beyond the point where the stuck hand tool is an issue on the Mac Studio. If it returns, I will do my best to provide the trouble shooting info.

Actually, we did review all the accessability settings ourselves and again on the phone with Apple. None of that was helpfull.

> She had the stuck hand issue from the beginning in PS right after all the apps were installed. Through a series of updates, OS and PS, the issue has gone away. I was not there to see exactly how it was cured. Initially, we tested with different keyboards to eliminate a stuck space bar. That was not the cause.

This sounds different from the lost mouse-up problem we are currently pursuing and which dominates this thread.

I'd have to see it happen with precise details on all the gestures: which Tool was being used, knowing exactly when the space key goes down, when the mouse button goes down, and when the space key and mouse button go up, and in which order. And which verison of Mac OS and Mac Photoshop. If you can reproduce this, the new Event Logger in 25.2 also works on Mac, and might offer some additional clues.

But it might be a completely different issue, up to and including being unknowingly stuck in some special keyboard mode offered by the Mac OS Accessibility Control Panel.

I have seen it on a brand new Mac Studio that belongs to a friend of mine. She had the stuck hand issue from the beginning in PS right after all the apps were installed. Through a series of updates, OS and PS, the issue has gone away. I was not there to see exactly how it was cured. Initially, we tested with different keyboards to eliminate a stuck space bar. That was not the cause.

>  I want to at least push back again on the "it's only 1%."

I think folks misunderstood why I reflected that guess - and it is just a guess. There have been good points about users who don't recognize the behavior as a problem, and users who don't post on the forums or call technical support. Altogether those additional users imply a multiplicative value to just the folks we can count on this thread. At the same time this bug got past all our internal testing, our internal users, and our beta testers, and it continues to defy our engineering efforts to reproduce it internally. That is also a problem. We do not know the root cause of this behavior, and as such, there are no simple fixes.

Under no circumstances do I want to suggest that we are minimizing the impact of this behavior on affected users. We are not being "dismissive". The problem is not being ignored. This is not how the product should behave and it is prioritized as a critical bug.

> many users experience this all the time on many different platforms.

Can you be more specific here? We're currently focused on Windows because that's where we have seen it happen. What other platforms?

Unfortunately this thread is months old and still no fix. We have even moved on from 24.x to 25.3.1 and still nothing.

In any case I want to at least push back again on the "it's only 1%." That maybe gives you comfort that it's ok left being not addressed, but as others have noted here, many users experience this all the time on many different platforms.

It is a very common problem and not a rare circumstance. It's also across many platforms, so it's indicative of a software issue and not common to some particular hardware. You even have users directly reproducing it here in this thread for you...so it is really frustrating to see that kind of dismissive response to such a major issue.

And and others noted - whatever data you need to make this issue go away, users are offering to provide.

This is the ANSWER!!! Coming back everytime I updated my PS, pls, ADOBE you should hire this guy not even joking. PLS FIX YOUR FKIN PROGRAMMMM.

This happens both on my home PC and work laptop and can be reproduced at will.

My work laptop is HP Elitebook with Core i5-10210U and integrated Intel UHD graphics, using Logi MX Vertical wireless mouse.

My home PC is self built with Ryzen 5 5600 and GeForce RTX 3070, using SteelSeries Rival 3 wired mouse.

Both Photoshop installs are clean without any plugins or addons or such. The only common factors between the computers are Photoshop and Windows 10 Business 22H2.