Illustrator Toolbars Constantly & Randomly Unresponsive

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
February 14, 2023
2 replies
900 views

This has been happening for years on multiple devices in various versions and it seems to be getting worse. I'll be working in the canvas and need to click a tool or layer or any ui and it's 100% unresponsive. The program has not crashed, I can still work in the canvas, but tools will no longer work.

This is random, frequent, and a complete workflow killer.

Please advise. This happens on desktop, tablet, and laptops. Windows 10 and 11.

All devices are at least a quadcore (desktop is octocore) and all devices have at least 32 gb of ram.

This also happens on both docked and undocked tools and it has no pattern.

I suspect illustrator is losing window focus to a background adobe cc process.

Bug

This topic has been closed for replies.

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @ericc19576445,

We understand that encountering technical issues can be frustrating. I hope the suggestions shared by sishamIAGD helped resolve the problem. If not, kindly share some more information, like the exact version of the OS/Illustrator, system configuration (CPU/GPU/Memory/Display Monitors), whether Illustrator behaves this way when using a particular tool/ feature/workflow, and a screen recording of the problem (https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator-discussions/screen-record-an-issue-on-windows-amp-macos-for-sharing/td-p/12967727), so we can identify the issue and provide the appropriate solution.

We appreciate your time and effort in helping us resolve this issue.

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,

Anubhav

ericc19576445Author

Known Participant

Unfortunately there is absolutely no pattern to this. I have 3 devices, a desktop, windows tablet, and laptop. It happens on all 3. It's been happening randomly for years. All 3 use various OS. windows 10, windows 11. Desktop has multiple monitors and tends to have more than 1 window open. Tablet does not. Usually a single window with illustrator. Both use normal screen mode. Both have very different environments and don't share similar softwares. Desktop uses undocked tools, tablet uses docked tools.

The only thing they have in common, is it only happens with Illustrator and they are high resolution (4k) systems so it's not malware. It's a bug in your software (probably an issue with how Illustrator handles 4k because there alot of other issues with Illustrator and high resolutions which you also have failed to address).

The only thing that fixes the issue is to open a new application to shift focus and then click back on the illustrator window to regain focus. It's nonsense.

Kevin Stohlmeyer

Community Expert

Hi @ericc19576445 there have been numerous posts about issues with 4K monitors over the years, here are some of the accepted solutions:

Set your monitor to 60hz refresh rate and have it connected directly to the computer, not through a dock or splitter.
Change Windows scaling to 150% or 175%.
Adjust the UI scaling in Illustrator preferences/UI Scaling.
Go to Illustrator.exe Properties and change the high DPI settings.

Hopefully some of these help you.