The panic level has gone from Red to Green. It would seem that John may have hit it on the nose.

After coming home from work, I read the postings. I did have a Watcom 4X5 retouch tablet plugged in. I unplugged it, opened up Photoshop, opened up an image, clicked the clone tool, and actually saw the cloning action take place. So in essence, it would seem that the Watcom tablet does interfer with Photoshop functions.

For those who read this, it may be helpful to understand the whole series of events.

Thirteen days ago, I bought all the parts to put together a 3.0 GHZ P4 system. I loaded the new XP operationg system, and immediately started loading all the other sofware as well. It was the next day when I loaded Photoshop CS2 onto the new system but had to have live teck support from Adobe to transfer the license from the old PC to the new one. I had loaned my Watcom tablet to my son so he could use it as a mouse (the tablet comes with both pen and mouse) with his laptop.

I don't think the Watcom tablet was plugged in when I used Photoshop last, showing my son some of the things you can do in Photoshop. A couple of days later, after he left, I plugged my Watcom tablet back in, put the retouch pen in the holder and the Watcom mouse on top of the pad (I normally use a PS2 mouse for retouch work). I think that yesterday, when I was having the problems with Photoshop, was the first time since I had plugged in the pad, AND for the first time, the the Watcom mouse was laying in the center of the pad.

Two possibilities come to mind:

1. The Watcom pad itself does not play well with Photoshop or
2. There was mouse confusion between the Watcom mouse laying on the pad and the PS2 mouse plugged in.

I will experiment with some variations to see if I can replicate and pinpoint the actual cause. When I get more detailed information, I will email Watcom with my findings. Too bad Adobe has such limited tech support, making it almost impossible to email them as well with my findings. Also it seems that the only way to get a solution to an Adobe problem, without paying an arm & leg for official Adobe tech support, is to tap into a forum like this. I really appreciate the suggestions through this forum. The one that worked probably saved me from putting a lot of change into the 'swear jar'.

Ole_Bach-Hansen

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Problems with the Clone Stamp Tool