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

>> Do you have an Adobe office near where someone with this problem, who is able to demonstrate it to you, lives?

We have observed the stuck-mouse issue. We've even see it happen briefly on our machines, and then it goes away. We can't make progress on this unless we can reproduce it. That involves using machine with a development environment with a debugger, and the ability to iteratively add diagnostic output as we hunt where things might be going wrong. Even when we can reproduce, that bug hunt may take days or weeks (Event handling bugs are like that). And, as mentioned in the sticky post, if the problem is that we are not even getting the needed event, we may have to pursue drasticly different event handling mechanisms; that will take a lot of time and effort.

@CJButler For the uninitiated, what changed between 24.7 and 25.0 that means you no longer see "WM_LBUTTONUP" ?

Do you have an Adobe office near where someone with this problem, who is able to demonstrate it to you, lives? The amount of time and money spent to chase this down and not reproduce it on your computers may be better spent actually having people show up to see it in action. 

My work computer does not have any fancy gaming equipment. The mouse I'd been using for the last year comes from the cheapest kit that money can buy (under $20 for the Logitech keyboard/mouse combo). It seems it was more likely to happen when the mouse was moved quickly.

Has anyone tried to step away from using an adobe system and just install the same software that the rest of us subscribe to? It could be hard to reproduce because you're using a system designed for development and the rest of us aren't?

But I'm sure someone, of the many who have posted here, would be willing/able to let you come into their house, business, etc... and see it in action. 

In Photoshop 25.2, we have added some diagnostic capacity to Photoshop to record in more detail what events Photoshop is seeing and how they are handled. The Event Logger is intended to help us diagnose problems with missing or mishandled events encountered by end-users.

The Event Logger is enabled using two setting files. Please navigate into one of the following locations:

Mac:
//Users/[User Name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop (Beta) Settings/

Windows:
[Installation Drive]:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop (Beta)\Adobe Photoshop (Beta) Settings\

Create/edit PSUserConfig.txt, and add this line: "TraceKeyAndMouseEvents 1"
Create/edit pslogSettings.txt, and add this line: "LogKeyAndMouseEvents=1"

When the above flags are enabled and Photoshop is launched, you will see a new menu item on the Help menu:
Help > Start Logging Events
Help > Stop Logging Events

This will put output into a log file which can be found in the following location:

Mac:
//Users/[User Name]/Library/Logs/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop 2024/

Windows:
[Installation Drive]:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2024\Logs\

To Set Up for Testing and Potential Problem Reproduction:
If you have seen the problems mentioned in this thread, we are interested in receiving your log files.

Please work normally until you see the stuck mouse down problem. Start Logging Events using the menu item and try to reproduce the problem while event logging is active. When you have seen the stuck mouse, Stop Logging and give the file to Adobe, either to a community manager, or by logging a bug with the supporting data.

Thank you!

Current status on this "stuck mouse-down" issue.

We're continuing to have extraordinary difficulty reproducing the issues at Adobe. We understand that for many of you in this thread the issue is happening very frequently, to the point of making the latest versions of Photoshop unusable.

Some of our users (Vit K, Alan P) in this thread added instrumentation to Photoshop using developer tools (Spy++) and observed in their fail cases that Photoshop was not even getting the WM_LBUTTONUP message from the Windows Operating System. The lack of this message will prevent the Photoshop "Mouse Tracking" gesture from terminating properly, leaving us in the stuck mouse-down state. Thank you Vit and Alan for that analysis.

We don't know why this happens on some machines and not others. There is some speculation that high-sample rate input devices (e.g. gaming mice with specialty device drivers) might be a factor. We're following up on that to see if it helps us reproduce the problem.

In Photoshop 25.2, we have added some diagnostic capacity to Photoshop to record in more detail what events Photoshop is seeing and how they are handled. There is some overlap with the Spy++ tool: The Event Logger is intended to help us diagnose event handling internal to Photoshop, whereas Spy++ looks at the events external to Photoshop.

Details on how to enable this new Event Logging mechanism will eventually posted on Adobe's HelpX pages. I'll post instructions in this thread as well.

However, if the problem looks like a situation where Photoshop never sees the WM_LBUTTONUP event, we'll have to look into alternate methods to detecting that the mouse-up has occured. Such solutions will likely be time-expensive to implement due to the complexity and testing required.

Update 2/16/24: The problem still exists in 25.5 and is still being worked by multiple engineers. We don't have any useful information to share but we are actively enhancing the Event Logging mechanism to allow us to gather more information. The bug remains elusive for us at Adobe. Please see the latest comments in this thread for the most up-to-date information.

Update 3/5/24: I have made some changes for 25.6 which which I hope will offer some relief for Mouse Users. There is some additional work for Pen users which I expect to be available for 25.7. 

Update 4/24/24: Photoshop version 25.7 has been posted and should address the remaining outstanding Pen issues of which we were aware.  We believe the original issue reported in this thread has been resolved. If you are still having lost mouse-up or pen-up problems with version 25.7 or later, please post with the version you are using, your platform and OS, and precise steps that make the problem occur for you. Please be as detailed as you can. We will try to reproduce at Adobe. We may ask you to generate an Event Log using the Event Logger Tool. We will continue to watch this thread for a while, but reserve the right to lock the thread if too many tangential issues are posted. As always, please keep your posts civil and informative and we will try to help. Thanks.

On 25.2 now and still having this issue. Nothing fixed so far.

When you think that the new update fixes the sticky tools issue, Adobe manages to surprise you. Let's enjoy another month of being annoyed. Super. I guess, they just stopped carrying.

                                                 
Quote:@goyah31195378aha7 

Yeah it's not just the hand tool. I experience this problem with other tools, such as when using the lasso tool or pen tool.  I think it can happen with any tool.  The problem seems to correct temporarily if I restart Photoshop but it comes back eventually.  For now I've reverted back to 23.5.5.

Please fix that. There's a pinned comment somewhere, that it will be addressed from August. And it's still in there. This impacts working a lot as it happens every few minutes. And it's not only the Hand tool that's stuck, the selection box sometimes gets stuck as well and I have to click for the selection process to end. Releasing the mouse button doesn't do it any more. Maybe you can use AI to figure the mouse behaviour out. It's useless for everything else.

I'm really tempted to go back to Photoshop 2021 which works like a charm.