Cheers, man... Points well-taken, and thanks for the note. I know Chris has probably been at this a long long time, so I can easily understand a natural aversion to situations that could lead to "false positives." I will see if I can get a couple example files uploaded tonight and send you some links. Coincidentally, I'm leaving town tomorrow and will have access to a relatively new iMac for a few days... so I'm planning on testing some things out while I have the opportunity. My hypothesis is that I will have the same issues that I do now with these types of files (i.e. those with moderate pixel dimensions, but dozens of layers and layer groups). I think the iMac may only have 4 GB of memory, (vs 24 on my current machine), so I may notice decreased responsiveness either way. I'll report back on what I find.
(Keep in mind, I have almost no programming knowledge, so please feel free to discard this if it's worthless speculation. Also—for me, this issue is almost always related turning the "eye" icon on or off, to make layers/groups visible or invisible... so that's my frame of reference.)
... my observations make me think that the mouse-up event or process (not even sure what terms to use) is designed to occur only after some other event(s) conclude(s). ...and that whatever normally triggers the mouse-up event is somehow bypassing it instead. I base this all on observing how this bug plays out in various situations.
- usually, the mouse-up eventually occurs on its own after a delay (ranging from "almost no delay," to "I've never seen something so slow on a non-crashing application.") In this cases, it seems like the mouse-up is waiting for something else to finish or occur, and then triggers.
- sometimes, the mouse-up never arrives (i.e. you can leave the room, come back an hour later, and it will still be stuck in the mouse-down state). These are the cases which make it seem like the thing that handles the mouse-up "missed the sign," and so it's in a down state (presumably forever, unless you add some variables to unstick it. e.g. click-click-clicking all around or doing a rapid series of double- triple- quadruple- (etc.) clicks seems to release it.
- occasionally, something less-common will transpire—something that appears not to center around interaction with the layers panel. For example, onece or twice (recently) I had a PS window get "stuck" for a few seconds—and it was obviously related to whateveer is causing things to get "stuck" as you turn things on and off in the layers pannel. Like the typical behavior of this bug, my sense was that the same rules applied here—do nothing, and it may unstick, but actually may not... click around a bunch and see if you can jar it loose, etc
If my line of thought above has any merit, the focus would naturally move towards identifying what types of things are leading to situations where the the authority over the mouse-up is either delaying or withholding the go-ahead. The obvious choices (again—in my own little pseudo-hypothesis here) would seem to involve screen redrawing, and maybe some other type of change to the GUI (e.g. the "eye" icon dis/appearing, the movement of items within the layers panel, etc.) The screen-redrawing thing seems potentially relevant since it can involve a lot of resources (presumably) which could involve withholding resources from other parts of the program (presumably, in my non-programmer mind, anyway).
I think I first noticed this bug when I clicked-and-held on a layer's "eye" icon and dragged downwards over several other layers' eye icons in order to (ostensibly) hide those in the same step. Instead of all of them turning off, the first couple turned off, and the rest stayed on—even though the mouse passed over them directly before I released the mouse button. Somewhere between my click and my eventual release, that event/process (or series of event/processes) was perhaps interrupted or stopped or whatever... it didn't seem to continue or complete. This example is one that recurrs a lot for me in regular use. Recently, I've noticed the following: that even though I clicked, dragged over a series of icons and then released, the mouse is still in the "down" state... and because of that, without pressing the mouse down again, I can simply pass the cursor over the icons that didn't turn off the first time. So essentially, this is the strongest link of a behavior to my theory above. The first time the mouse passes over those layer visibiltiy icons, some of them don't receive the instructions to "turn invisible"... yet, after a delay, you can pass the mouse (now in a physical "up" state) back over them and they'll turn off/invisible.
Anwyay... hopefully there's some little detail there that sets of a lightbulb for someone... Thanks for the interest!
-J
P.S. Re: the WACOM issues—the first things I generally looked to when this started happening were my WACOM tablet and my 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator. The issue I'm having isn't related to those issues, but it's good to point them out anyway... they're definitely worth eliminating when trouble-shooting (which I did).
P.S. This issue only happens for me in Photoshop (CS5.x-only). I use Illustrator (CS5) very heavily as well, and have never had problems. I don't use InDesign, or any other Adobe apps much.
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