Photoshop 25.3.1 crashes when trying to use Remove Tool

[Bill Junk]

I have a Dell Precision 3660 Workstation, with Windows 11 Version 23H2 OS Build 22631.3007, and NVIDIA RTS A2000 12 GB graphic. The Dell diagnostic tools report that the graphics are functioning without error.  I have run 2 different checks and they both say that all drivers are up to date.  DelI's version of the NVIDIA driver is reported as 31.0.15.3770, however this does not match up with the version shown on NVIDIA's web site, likely because it's really the Dell version number.

I have loaded an image in Photoshop 25.3.1 and then tried to use the Remove tool to edit the photo.  I was hoping to experiment with the feature and have never tried it before.  For several attemps after selection the remove tool and moving the curor over the image, Photoshop presented an hour glass for about 5 seconds, then crashed.  On one of these tries I found an event log which reported an Exception Access Violation from Thread 0 with the message "3221225477 The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s."  On my last attempt, Photoshop recognized a problem and presented me with a window that allowed me to send in an error report, which I did.  There are a number of logs stored on my system but I don't see anything that lets me diagnose the issue.

I have looked at the Adobe site and found that there is a known issue with the Remove Tool where there is a recommendation to make sure the latest driver is installed and then to select the "More Stable" option for Remove Tool processing.  I made the change but the problem still existed.

One option would be to load a new graphics driver directly for NVIDIA, however, Dell provides customized drivers for their systems.  A call to Dell Tech Support didn't provide any details of what the customization entails, nor any idea regarding what the consequences might be if I did replace the Dell driver with the NVIDIA driver.

For now the Remove Tool is not essential to what I'm doing, but any crash is concerning to me.  Any thoughts?

[Bill Junk]

The one thing that I noticed that had been changed in my preferences was the use of the scroll wheel on my mouse.  I reset it to allow it to control zoom of the image.  The Remove Tool still worked after I made the change.  My Remove Tool setting in Preferences are set to "Faster".