Known Participant

Question

Can't Deselect Mystery Object on Illustrator

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
February 5, 2020
11 replies
11249 views

This happens to me every single day. Illustrator randomly adds a "mystery object" which looks like an empty bounding box to my selection. I can't deselect it. In my layers panel it shows nothing as being selected. Normally I just select all, then deselect to make it go away, but this time it's not working. This makes accurate scaling of my real objects impossible because the selection will include this mystery object. I've combed the forums and found dozens of people with this exact problem, but none of the suggestions on those threads are working. I've read things about it being related to clipping masks or artboards, but this happens to me even when I'm only using one artboard and no clipping masks. Does adobe have any sort of explanation as to why this is happening?

{Renamed by MOD}

Performance

W

wnwka

Inspiring

+1 This.. Unacceptable that this is still a thing.. Just bonkers.

artyomb17544235

Participant

year 2025, bug is still there

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @artyomb17544235,

Would you mind confirming the version of the OS/Illustrator installed if Illustrator behaves this way with all files and screenshots/screen recordings of the problem, so I can better assist you?

Also, please try the suggestions shared above and share your observations.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

M

Megan KuhnAuthor

Known Participant

Hi Anubhav, if you read the thread, it's clear that the problem spans across many operating systems and versions of Illustrator. There is a wealth of information describing the problem already in this forum. What else is missing on Adobe's end to address it?

C

Community Act23062488yktc

Participant

For me what happens is I select objects inside of groups and exit out the group with the item selected still. ESC won't deselct that object. Solution is using Deselect (Shift + Ctrl + D), which the command is different than Photoshop (Ctrl + D). Hope this helps future headaches.

Riley Swett

Known Participant

This usually happens for me with text objects in particular, it will not let me deselect it, which seems to be a similar issue to what you've been experiencing. I have found that doing ctrl+A to select all and then ctrl+shift+A to deselect all fixes the issue in most cases for me, and if the problem keeps happening shutting down Illustrator completely and reopening usually solves this.

If this isn't solving the issue I would check for rogue points in your layer stack or by holding ctrl to see if the "mystery object" is caused by invisible, lone points.

Hope this is helpful!

ericc19576445

Known Participant

This has been one of the most annoying bugs (of a long list of many others) I have dealt with daily for over 15 years. Adobe doesn't care or listen. They just want you to shut and accept all their obvious flaws. The UX of Adobe products is so uneccessarily stressful all the time. New features no one asked for and the same bugs we've all been screaming about. If it doesn't help get new users, they don't care and it really shows.

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meldessouky

Participant

Problem still there on latest version 26.5 and it's really annoying...

S

steve53443089465

Participant

This bug has been around for as long as I've been using Illustrator, which must be at least 15 years.

What sometimes works is to create an object, direct select, resize and undo.

Would be even better if the bug was finally fixed.

D

diipu

Participant

like MS windows, bugs with you forever.

A

Anonymous

Hey, I sort of found a workaround for this annoying bug. If press CTRL+A (CMD+A) to select all and then

click anywhere in the empty space to deselect everything, it comes back to normal. It works 99% percent of the times on windows. I haven't tried that on a Mac.

Z

ZooN_

Inspiring

That's exactly how I deal with this bug, quick and easy. Can confirm this works on a Mac too.

Srishti Bali

Community Manager

Hi Megan,

So sorry to hear about this issue. I am hopeful that the issue is resolved by now. If not, I would request if you can share a few more details like:

Screenshot of the object.
OS and version of Illustrator.
Graphic cards installed on the machine.
Does it help if you turn off GPU performance from Illustrator Preferences (CTRL/ CMD+ K > Performance > uncheck GPU Performance)?

Regards,

Srishti

Johnny Lambie

Participant

Hi @Shistri, your suggestions do not seem to help.
This really is a serious bug - and has been going on for years and years.
When it happens it registers Illustrator completely useless - you simply cannot manipulate an object without this "invisible" mystery object affecting every action.