Photoshop: Cursor "Frozen" After Certain Period of Time

[loganf8666721]

Whenever I open a file, everything seems to operate as normal. After an arbitrary amount of time, whether I zoom out with scrub zoom, or switch to a different brush or move the file with the hand tool, the cursor will change to the default mouse pointer and I'm unable to do anything to my file. I can select different tools in the toolbars and menus, but when my cursor hovers over my file, it visually appears as the default OS cursor and I cannot alter, adjust or manipulate the file.

My temporary solutions have been to close and reopen the file. This works very briefly and makes the process of working incredibly tedious. On average I can work for about 10-15mins before this happens.

I went into preferences and allotted 85% to performance, added a scratch disk so my main drive would be overburdened, but this doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

This started happening after Creative Cloud automatically installed the latest photoshop so I installed an older version and the problem seems to persist on the old and new version.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

»This started happening after Creative Cloud automatically installed the latest photoshop«

You need not enable auto-updating and one can avoid un-installing the previous version when installing a new one. 

What is the primary Scratch Disk? 

What have you done for trouble-shooting so far?

Does turning off »Use Graphics Processor« in the Performance Preferences (Photoshop > Preferences > Performance > Graphic Processor Settings) and restarting Photoshop have any bearing on the issue? (I know that is not a solution but just a diagnostic action.) 

Restoring Preferences after making sure all customized presets like Actions, Patterns, Brushes etc. have been saved might be a good starting point:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/basic-trouble-shooting-steps.html

[loganf8666721]

Thanks for the reply.

I went through and did everything mentioned, sadly nothing changed. It seems completely arbitrary when the file will freeze and my mouse cursor won't update.

[loganf8666721 · Accepted solution]

After doing some more digging and I found a thread that was experiencing the same problems I was.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/photoshop-2020-canvas-quot-freezes-quot-and-remains-on-scre...

TLDR: the resolution to this problem was something I had tried prior but didn't work. However going through the thread lead me to this potential solution that so far has worked out for me: Disabling Pan Flicking.

Preferences -> Tools -> Enable Flick Panning (Uncheck it)

Some people have said this hasn't solved the issue, but it seems to have worked for me. Not sure why this little thing causes such a huge disruption in the workflow.

[broscosmoline]

Hi there, i'm new to this forum so  my question is probably basic, yet I cannot surf it up on the forum. In Photoshop Elements 2021 /Win10, i want to disable flick panning for the reasons described above. Problem: cannot seem to navigate to "Tools" dialogue box: edit>preferences> has no "tools" option, nor does anything related appear under "general".  The "Tools Options" icon on the bottom tray yields only selections relating to zoom and page size functions.  Can you help me?

[dawidzadlo]

I have a temporary and quick solution for that. When the cursor stops working properly, go to Window > Arrange > New Window for... <the name of the document you're working on>

It opens the same document in a new tab, so you can close the "broken one" and the cursor will work in the new one. It saves more time that to save the document, close it and reopen.

Hope that makes sense.