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Photoshop CS3 Stuck on Hand Tool/icon

[Update 13/09/09]
Thanks to a commenter below, it looks like one can simply hit the space bar on the keyboard to fix the issue!

Opened up Photoshop CS3 today to find that none of the tools worked at all. No matter what tool i selected the mouse cursor would stay stuck on the hand icon and attempting to use the tool anyway did nothing. I was really quite confused. I couldn’t find a thing on the internet about it at all. I restarted the application several times with no dice. In my frustration I went to grab a drink. When i came back, the Photoshop application i had left open was working just fine *shrugs*. Odd huh?

I took another look on Google about it later and saw a few people discussing it. Some claimed it was a memory issue, some said you needed to reset all the tool and window preferences citing that the preferences file was corrupted. Seems to me a healthy dose of time is all it needs. My guess is that the thread managing the tools got held up doing something trivial such as looking for updates over the net.

Anyhow, thought I’d shout it out as i was pretty annoyed over it at the time.

  1. Toni Plutonij
    August 13th, 2009 at 13:02 | #1

    I know it’s a year old post, and that nobody actually cares at this point, but to let you know….Next time, just press SPACE….yeah that big key on your keyboard..

    :) Should fix your problem!

  2. September 13th, 2009 at 00:29 | #2

    @Toni Plutonij
    Actually, I care because I only recently started having the same issue. That’s the reason I’m here reading your post.
    In PS-CS3 I went to “Edit>Purge>All” and cleared everything out with no luck.
    So I restarted PS with no luck.
    So I googled the problem which brought me here. I thought I would try hitting “space bar.” But when I went back to PS it was working normally again.
    Next time I’ll try hitting “that big key on [my] keyboard” to see if it will work sooner.
    Thanks.

  3. maddy
    September 25th, 2009 at 03:30 | #3

    wow that is retarded but the space works!

  4. mirrordrum
    November 11th, 2009 at 06:07 | #4

    @Toni Plutonij

    thanks for the spacebar tip, Toni. i was about to reinstall ps cs3 after reading and trying about 5 other suggestions. saw your tip, hit the space bar, et voila!

    thanks a lot. :)

  5. Ginny
    March 26th, 2010 at 06:18 | #5

    Spacebar didn’t work. Clearing everything out didn’t work. Time didn’t work.
    But Control Panel > Appearance > Display settings > Make text larger or smaller > Select Medium instead of Large worked!

    The program won’t work with Large font settings, but will work correctly with Medium font settings. My computer was set on Large so an older knitting program would work. So now it’s back on Medium.

    Hope this helps someone.

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