Drop Down Menus in Photoshop CS 6 Goes Blank In Mavericks

[TKirkeberg]

Hi

I'm having trouble with Photoshop CS6 in Mavericks. After a working a little while, all pop up/drop down menus goes blank. They still work, but I can't see what's on them. Even the Apple menu bar is afflicted by this, though only when Photoshop is in the front.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.  PS: I do use a cintiq on a 2012 Macbook Pro 15" with retina display.

[Mmaher6540]

Alright friends, I have had no further problems with the blank menus popping up. 

I am, however, still having problems with the driver being recognized by Mavericks and have had to install the latest wacom driver upon every boot up session.  My brush is still freezing, no matter what login I use, even after carefully taking the time to reinstall photoshop (not migrating preferences and brushes and so on) on to another user name.     

This is really taking it's toll on me.  Problem after problem.  I know frustration will not provide an answer, but this update has been very dabilitating.

Michael 

[J453]

Michael,

Yeah. Sounds like the same thing audiovisualboy was seeing. New Admin user account installation I suggested above seemed to be the ticket: http://forums.adobe.com/message/5804060#5804060

[wijngnut]

Hello. I was wondering how you managed to fix the blank menu problem. I'm not having any problems with my wacom brush not working but still getting the the blank menus after about 20mins of working in photoshop. I have tried resetting preferences and have also reinstalled wacom drivers.

Its driving me up the wall so any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[wijngnut]

I Think I've managed to fix it. Originally I downloaded the driver for wacom tablet as soon as I got the Mac on for the first time last week. Then I installed Mavericks. After I got the problem of black menus I followed suggestions to uninstall the wacom drivers then reinstall. As I had the driver installer already in my downloads I didn't bother downloading them from the wacom web site. The problem wasn't resolved so I tried the preference reset which also didn't work.

Lastly I deleted the Wacom driver and the uninstalled. Then I redownloaded it from the wacom web site. This time I haven't had the black menus for a few hours now. Fingers crossed. Maybe there's been a resent update to the drivers to work with Mavericks, I didn't check the failing drivers version. The working one is v5.3.3-3 for bambo.

[Mmaher6540]

Update:

  After creating a completely new user and carefully migrating select files and reinstalling applications and drivers, I had the same blank menu problem in Photoshop last night. 

  My system was working smoothly after several working days previous to this.  Here is what I had done:

•  I turned off 'Displays Have Separate Spaces' (I noticed that when I was working on my cintiq monitor, the top menu bar would occasionally flash on my laptop, prompting me to  disable.

•  I ran a disk utility to repair permissions (of which there were quite a few)

•  I went to 'Wacom Tablet Utility' in applications and created a 'backup folder' and 'restored' my tablet. 

•  I reset Photoshops preferences as suggested

  The cobination of these changes made my computer recognize my tablets and drivers upon startup and eliminated the blank menu problem until last night.

After performing every preference/utility/new user/driver suggestion listed I still encounter a few issues:

•  The brush stalling never went away

•  The polygonal lasso tool, occasionally 'acts a fool' (technical term). Albiet less often now.

I called Wacom:

"They're working on a new driver", "reinstall the old OS"...

THANKS!

Michael

[Venture1]

I also seem to have been able to fix the menu issue by uninstalling and reinstalling the Wacom driver (Uninstalled both driver and preferences using the Wacom Tablet Utility, then restored prefs from backup).

It's been about a week now that the issue hasn't happened on the iMac.

I'm also having less brush stalling, or at least it happens "differently", but there's still some kind of stalling, I need to observe this more... I won't yet confirm that the brush stalling issue has been fixed.

[Bryan In Box]

Having the ghost menu problem running CS5 on a new Mac Mini 2.6 running Mavericks.

Restarting solves it until the next time, but kills workflow. Keyboard shortcuts still work. Trying reinstalling Wacom drivers but I'm not optimistic about that as a fix.

[ChrisML]

For anyone curious. I did a screen share with Jeffrey and after sending him diagnostic files he was able to reproduce the "brush hanging/stalling" issue on his own computer. Adobe is working on a solution and hopefully they are a step closer now. I still think it's the Wacom Drivers.

[J453]

Thanks Chris. Yeah. Still need to figure out where the hangup is at between PS, the tablet/driver and Mavericks.

I'm still looking to a do a screen share debugging session with someone with the white menus/dialogs issue.

[Mmaher6540]

Hey Jeffrey, earlier today I experienced the blank out menus again.  I reinstalled the driver and they went away.  If they happen again I will offer to do a screen share session.

Michael

[J453]

Thank you.

[ChrisML]

Have you guys figured anything out yet?

[Venture1]

I can do a screen share, but since I'm in the UK, it might be hard to find a compatible time, let me know if I can help somehow.

Also, just an update about what I tried: I've had the problem happen on a total of 4 iMacs and my own MacBook Pro. I've reinstalled the Wacom driver on one iMac, and the problem hasn't happened yet on it for 3 days. I've also reinstalled the driver on my MacBook Pro and the problem is still not fixed there. The problem is much much more frequent on my 5 year old MacBook Pro than on the new iMacs. It seems to happen 2-3 times over a 5-6 hour period on the MBP, while it only happens once a day at most on the iMacs. Strange!

[Bryan In Box]

Similar to EliseM86, I reinstalled Wacom drivers and the problem did not occur for a couple of days. It just came back. I dislike this new Mavericks feature. I don't see how this is a Wacom problem. It seems like it has to be PS and OS 10.9.

[Bryan In Box]

Reinstalling Wacom drivers worked about as long as restarting PS. Most vexing.

[TKirkeberg]

Completely removing and installing the newet driver from Wacom seemed to have don the trick for me as well.

[Venture1]

On my brand new (bought yesterday) Retina MacBook Pro I'm also having the blank menu issue. I don't know how reinstalling the Wacom driver could help here, as I've only just installed both that and Photoshop, and the system was Mavericks to begin with. I can try if there's a point though.

So far every computer I have used with Mavericks exhibits the issue! That's 4 new iMacs, one older MacBook Pro and a new Retina MacBook Pro. As I've said above, I've reinstalled the Wacom driver on one iMac, and it seems to have fixed the issue there, though the other iMacs didn't seem to get the issue since then either, so it's very possible that the problem doesn't appear for a few days, and it's unrelated to the driver being reinstalled... I don't know!

But since my rMBP is new, I don't see the difference between installing something for the first time and reinstalling it the next day. Also, it happens far more often on my old MBP (once every 1-2 hours) than on the iMacs (at most once or twice every 9 hours, but often there's no issue for several days).

I'm also having the brush stalling issue with my rMBP: the brush cursor (circle) doesn't change to a mouse pointer when I go over the panels or tools on the side. It stays a circe and I can't seem to paint with it, though I can switch to another tool and back to the brush, and it works again. This issue is more frequent and annoying as it happens about once every 10 mins.

[roundhouse-IT]

I am a system administrator of a design agency with ~100 iMacs running CC.  We have had this problem crop up sporadically since upgrading a pilot group (10) of our designers and retouchers to 10.9.  Though they fix interaction with the login screen and preference problems, the "photoshop blank menu" problem persists after upgrading Wacom drivers to the most current version.  There doesn't seem to be any reproducible steps, but each iMac experiences it at least once per day.  We haven't seen an instance of this problem on iMacs which haven't been upgraded to 10.9.  I can provide console logs if that would be helpful, but it would be really nice to have a resolution - this is severely impacting my user's workflow.

[Guest]

One thing i've noticed is that the issue is much worse if adobe lightroom is also open.

Editing photos from LR to Photoshop is awful - the problem happens within a few mins. Yet if I dont have LR open it might work for an hour or more before it happens.

[Bryan In Box]

This adds to my suspicion that focus on Wacom/Intuos drivers is a diversion and the issue is with Adobe and OS 10.9

[Mmaher6540]

I'm sorry, but this problem is deplorable.  I cannot believe a solution has not yet been reached.  Clearly this is happening across the board with a large number of customers.

Something needs to be done. 

People pay a lot of money for this software.

Obviously, there are users here willing to help. 

Radio silence is simply upseting.

Michael

[EliseM86]

This problem is still happening for me in both CS5 and a CC trial I downloaded but the frequency isn't so bad since updating the wacom drivers.

At least with CS5 I could reinstall using my discs if the problem became impossible the work with!

[MarkD3]

Everything was working until I upgraded the OS. There are no isues with the mouse or trackpad.  Only the Wacom.  I suspect there is simply an issue between the OS and tablet (driver).  Possibly a memory leak based on the odd timing.  It also seems to be mainly with healing brushes. I have 125 images to edit so I dont care who fixes it as long as it gets fixed...preferably before I start to lose income. 

Mark

[audiovisualboy]

Hey everyone, two-cents / update time.....

@Mark: Exact same for me.  Everything working just fine before upgrading the OS to Mavericks.  It's so frustrating.  My issues remain with the Wacom Tablets specifically, not the blank menu issue that I see others experiencing (thank goodness). The one work around I have found is that I downloaded an older driver for my Bamboo Create tablet.  [see below for more details]

@Michael:  I totally agree with you it is insane and some of us make our livelihood using this software and hardware we have paid for with hard earned dollars (or pay for every month in the case of Adobe). Everything worked fine before Mavericks and it's just so maddening. 

@VonRiesling: I had this suspicion too, however I have to add that I have noticed that my Wacom preferences keep getting "forgotten" every time after my Mac comes back "awake" which points more towards a problem on the Wacom/Apple end, but then that doesn't account of other peoples problems with the blanks menus that I've seen. 

Me personally, my situation has been 1) pen cursor lag when drawing/painting in Photoshop (the spinning grey circles), and 2) Wacom preferences (especially screen mapping) being forgotten constantly.  I have two tablets.  My large Intuos4 for at home use, and my Bamboo Create that I keep in my bag for field work.  I use a Macbook Pro Retina with OSX Mavericks installed that I "dock" at home, in other words it's what I use all the time for all my work.

Originally Jeff Tranberry and I troubleshot and discovered that creating a new user account provided some relief, but doing a migration is time consuming and a bit of pain.  So I tried suffering through a bit.

The most recent problem that I ran into was trying to get my Bamboo tablet to even work AT ALL.  So I uninstalled all my drivers for Wacom and the thing that has FINALLY given me a working condition is to download an OLDER driver here: http://us.wacom.com/en/support/legacy-drivers  I grabbed 5.3.2-2 and that did the trick for me.  I have not even attempted trying to get my Intuos working again yet.  I might do that now. 

-christopher.

[Mr. Blue 39]

Why is there nothing but silence from the adobe team?  I too make my lively hood using Photoshop and i have to add that this problem didn't start happening until the Maverick update.  My photoshop ran fine under moutain lion and all of the previous updates. 

Restarting photoshop evertyime my menu's turn white is not cutting it.  I need a fix and I need it asap.  I reinstalled updated wacom drivers that seemed to do the trick for a few days, and now it's back to white drop down menu's. 

Similar to horror films when you think you've killed the monster it strikes back when you least expect it!

I forgot to add that I too am using an intuos 3 wacom tablet.

Severely frustrated!

Mr. Blue