Sometimes, my trackpad will randomly start trying to drag everything and it will only drag things. I usually need to restart my Mac to fix it. Logging out doesn't seem to do anything.
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.
I am also experiencing this problem. It was happening before the last trackpad update though. My solution has been to connect my bluetooth mouse but that only solves the problem sometimes.
This has been happening to me recently after installing the latest updates. I just hit the "escape" key each time, and that seems to work w/o needing to restart my system.
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 called Apple and they told me to turn off "tap to click" on the trackpad settings. That fixed the problem, but on the flip side I can no longer tap. Slight inconvenience, but problem's gone.
I turned off "One Finger Dragging" and have not had the problem since. It has been long enough that I am starting to feel confident I have found the solution to my problem.
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.
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!
@scutter: I've been having these symptoms with a 2010 unibody, but I do think that's a software issue. However, with my previous MB Pro (Late 2007), it did in fact turn out to be the battery... the issue kept getting worse and worse, and eventually I did the math, popped out the battery, and realized that it was bulging significantly. Unfortunately I was on the road at the time and couldn't replace the battery for another 3 week, but by the time I got home the battery had completely come apart at the seams. Even though the MB was out of warranty for over two years, the kind folks at my local genius bar replaced the battery for free. Unfortunately the frame of the MB was permanently warped at this stage (though this shouldn't happen with the unibody?). My advice would be to get a new battery ASAP, before the frame is deformed.
I haven't had this problem since I disabled "Tap to Click" in System Preferences. It's much better now also because I don't get those accidental selections while scrolling or moving around in the active window.
