Trackpad gets stuck on drag mode

I am having the same problem. The stupid glass trackpad on my laptop keeps forcing itself into drag mode.

It is as if I have somehow clicked the trackpad and held it down while moving the cursor around. (When in fact, I have NOT, I repeat NOT clicked or otherwise inadvertently touched the trackpad in any manner other than tracking the cursor about the screen.)

Random UI elements suddenly start being dragged around the screen by the cursor. Or selecting massive amounts of text from some unknown origin selection point. Hitting the esc key does nothing.

The only thing that seems to work is forcefully hitting the trackpad, but I'm sure that will just wind up exacerbating the issue or outright breaking the trackpad entirely.

Meanwhile something has usually been dragged into the trash, or off the dock, or text is removed from my document and clipped onto the desktop.

It is very annoying and frustrating.

If your Macbook battery is removable and is located directly under your touchpad a bloated swollen battery could be the problem. Try this:

1. Remove battery
2. Connect to magsafe power and boot up.
3. Try using your touchpad

If this fixes the problem you likely have a swollen or bloated lithium battery. My symptoms on my 15" late 2008 Macbook Pro were that the touchpad acted like it was stuck in drag mode. The bottom left and right touchpad switches would not click or took great effort to press. I had to hit the touchpad very hard for a mouse click to be recognized. It also screwed up opration of my bluetooth mouse. I noticed several months earlier the battery cover no longer closed tightly; there was a gap. I should have been more curious as to why.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2008) MacBookPro5,1

FB4700LL/A ( MB4700LL/A )

http://sites.uci.edu/lifepo4battery/2011/05/19/swollen-lithium-batteries-swell-c osts/

"Battery bloat or “swollen batteries” is a common occurrence among older lithium ion batteries. It is commonly caused by overcharging a battery and then leaving it unused for a long time. It may also be caused by extreme changes in temperature. More often than not, battery bloat essentially “kills” the battery, rendering it unusable or unsafe for further use."

Sounds to me like your trackpad might be overheating. I have seen this problem before on PC's and MACs. When a trackpad overheats it can at times think that it is constantly pressed down.

When it happens next take out the battery (if you can on your model) and see if the underneath of the trackpad is unusually hot. If it is then the battery is probably your problem.

If you cannot take out the battery (more recent models) then I would suggest just seeing if the machine itself is hot. If it is I think a genius bar visit is in order for you.

Hope that helps,

Callaghan001

I'm having the same problem here, takes quite an effort to get it to stop dragging and it's indeed very annoying because a lot of things end up in the wrong place.

When was this trackpad update? I always install all updates but can't remember when the last trackpad update came in. Was it one for getting that new trackpad working on desktop Macs?

I am having the same problem. Very frustrating, I've tried to figure out what is causing it to get stuck and there is nothing specific that I can find that I am doing to cause this to happen. My mac is less then a year old so i doubt it is a battery issue and my mac doesn't get too hot.So i don't think it is that either. I did recently download the update as well! I hope apple fixes this issue soon or finds the cause of this problem.

I just bought a new MacBook Pro 13" last week and have 10.6.4 with all updates installed. Even before applying updates, the trackpad behaved erratically and continues to do so. After scrolling vertically or horizontally, the tracking seems to stop for brief moments even though my fingers are still moving. IT IS ANNOYING AND MAKES THE LAPTOP USELESS without an external mouse.

I turned off drag lock in track pad settings. I still have a problem with the track pad being too sensitive in that I click on things that I never intended on including accidentally buying a movie in iTunes.

I have been having this problem for on and off for about four months now, and I do not have a solution.

The issue itself is aggravating enough, but what really makes me mad is that I paid a LOT of money for the hardware and the SOFTWARE/OS for photo editing and for school use. To invest that much money into such a key component of my education and to have it not work properly is honestly infuriating. Apple knows that a lot of people are having this issue and they have been for sometime. I just have one question: where is the patch/update?

I have read a lot of forums on this issue and the only temporary solution is to give the computer a hard restart.

Same problem here ... my MacBook Pro is useless without an external mouse. It happens right away after the first time I click after startup.

The problem started 3-5 days ago so I suspect it is a bug caused by the lastest update.

Apple, please fix this!!!

I had the same problems when I get the Firmware update 1.0 installed. It happened very frequently. A week ago I wiped my hard disk and did a re-installation of snow leopard and skipped this particular update. So far the touch pad has been working perfectly. So I suggested who ever got the same problem and can afford a reinstallation should just go ahead and do it. It's just so **** stupid that apple will not let you uninstall updates though.

I've had this problem for a while. I am one of those people where the problem goes away when I take out the battery. It's almost like the battery expands and reduces the space that the trackpad has in order to operate. So, simple taps become click to drag, etc. Anyone else notice this problem on their laptop. I have the 15" first unibody generation from 2008.

Same problem here. This has become a crushing nightmare. My Macbook Pro is virtually useless. I have to reboot every time the problem happens. It just sickens me how miserable this computer is now. I had no problems at all for the first 8 months of usage. Is there any fix at all so I dont have to reboot 6-7 times per session?

This may be a coincidence, but I've noticed that, sometimes, quitting Mail.app and waiting a while will make the stuck-dragging problem go away.

Like the others, I noticed this starting to happen recently, somewhere around the timing of the 10.6.4 update. I also had my MBP serviced at around the same time though, and they were working around the area of the trackpad, so I am torn as to whether this is a hardware or software problem...but it hopefully sounds like software, if other people are having the same issue!

I started having a similar problem when I upgraded my Mid-2009 MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard. Each time I tried to move the mouse pointer, I would start selecting huge swathes of text. By following the double-clicking solution mentioned above, it seemed that I could stop the selection for that block of text, but I'd soon be selecting text accidentally again.

Since I hadn't had the problem with Leopard, I figured it must have been a problem created with the upgrade to Snow Leopard. As it is a pointer problem, the most likely suspect was Accessibility improvements.

To fix my issue, I visited System Preferences->Universal Access->Mouse & Trackpad. There, I moved the "Initial Delay" slider one jot towards 'Short', to make OSX process my 'tap' input more immediately, so making my touch on the touchpad less like a 'drag' (and select) and more like ... a 'tap'. It now works as it did before I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

Hope that helps
smallfry25

Happening to me and it is very frustrating as others have described. I've been able to break it before by attaching a mouse but it just now happened to me on the road and I was stuck for a while before discovering the two-finger tap suggestion in this thread. That seems to be a viable workaround to break the drag death lock. Apple, please fix this debilitating problem!