Photoshop/mouse help, please! (fixed)

Published 28 May 06 by Justin French, 2 comments

So, something strange started happening in Photoshop (7.01, yes I’m old school) over the past few days, and I’ve run out of possible causes and solutions.

In short, when I single click on a tool in the Tools pallet that has more than one option (like the Marquee selection tool), it instantly shows me all choices for that tool (elliptical, single column, single row, etc) rather than just selecting the “top” tool. Until recently, I’d have to click-and-hold to get these options — and indeed that’s still the behaviour I get in illustrator.

At first I thought it was the new Microsoft mouse, so I unplugged that and switched back to the Mighty Mouse. No luck. I uninstalled the Microsoft mouse software, no luck. I then noticed that I get the same behaviour using the Powerbook’s built-in mouse button (but interestingly, not when tapping the trackpad itself).

I trashed any Photoshop related preference and setting files I could find in ~/Library/ and ~/Library/Preferences/, I upgraded from Photoshop 7.0 to 7.0.1, I did some rudimentary Googling, I stared at the Photoshop and OS X preferences and restarted the system many many times along the way.

No such luck.

Yes, I’ll be grabbing the universal binary Photoshop CS3 when it’s released, but (with the exception of the new Microsoft mouse) this is a hardware and software set-up I’ve been using for months on end without any trouble.

Any ideas on where I should be looking or what it might be, I’d really love to hear from you in the comments of by email.

Update: Ok, went to the Adobe site and downloaded any plugin or update that they have for Photoshop 7.0.x, and one of them (the AltivecCore Update, which is for G4 processors was the one, I think) managed to “fix” the problem. Don’t look at me for answers, and I’m reluctant to go tinkering — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.