Dear Chris Cox,

I see that you missed reading my earlier posts in this thread, and you seem to have skipped a lot of other user's posts as well. If you look back you will find that not only did I report using a Mobile Intel 945 Express graphics chip (so you can't blame ATI there), but I also found evidence suggesting that Photoshop CS2 does indeed hijack the ESC key: By pressing ESC in a different application I was able to cancel the loading of a large image in Photoshop. Please explain this in terms of "it's not our fault, blame so and so..."

Others have reported similar issues with other graphics cards still, many users having NVIDIA graphics cards and drivers - and you still claim it's ATI's fault? Even though killing the process of the respective graphics card's control center, or deleting the plugins folders, or turning off UAC seems to alleviate the problem in some circumstances, the one common denominator in all reported cases is... Photoshop!

You should be careful not to utter ridiculous statements like "sorry that you continue to blame the wrong party", when in fact you seem to be doing just that. It's evident that you are not on the Adobe marketing team, or you would probably know better and choose your wording more carefully. Please remember that most customers writing here are not media trained, but rather just frustrated users. You, on the other hand, represent Adobe and should really not be the one taking this discussion to the sandbox level. Perhaps some basic training on marketing and customer communication would be in place if you are to continue participating in these forums? I just took the time to re-read this entire thread and not anywhere did I see the "Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention, we take your concerns seriously and will go to great effort to find a solution to this problem which seem to cause a great deal of aggravation to our valued customers" response one could expect from a reputed software company. Instead all your responses seem to be trying to blame someone else. It's so unprofessional - and immature - it leaves me flabbergasted.

I do recognize that computer systems of today are incredibly complex, with a myriad of potentially conflicting software running simultaneously, there is a slim chance that Photoshop is not actually the culprit here. But let's face it - at this point there is no strong evidence that suggests that. Rather, since Adobe's official attitude has always been "its' probably not our fault..." it's way too likely that your next (silent) thought was "...so we're not even going to look into it with a great deal of effort".

It just goes to show what Adobe really stands for, and frankly - it leaves me quite disappointed.

Chris, has ATI ever said why they might want to absorb Escape key presses for certain applications?  Or did it just seem to be a bug in their Hotkeys implementation?  Notably Hotkeys were not even enabled by default, at least not on my setup.

-Noel

Chris,

I have a brand new Sony Vaio laptop using an Nvidia GT 520M graphics card, and yet I am experiencing this exact problem with my Esc key. This clearly isn't an ATI issue in my case.

I'm using Windows 7 64-bit and Adobe Photoshop CS4 64-bit. If I close Photoshop normal Esc key functionality returns... that points to Photoshop as being related to the problem. You can try to shift the blame to other parties if you want, but you can't deny that the Esc key works perfectly when Photoshop isn't running.

Adding another case to the list here....

I am running Photoshop CS3 on Vista 64 and just recently started having this same issue.

I am not sure what the exact change would have been, but it started happening less than a month ago.

...I close PS CS3 and the problem goes away.

I am already in the midst of upgradding my whole system, hardware and software to Win 7x64 and CS 5.5, so it is not a crisis for me. But as I live in Photoshop and Illustrator most of the time, a non functioning escape key is pretty frustrating. If I can help diagnose the problem, let me know.