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Can't Drag and Drop Anything

I've installed OS X Lion and now when I click on an icon on my desktop and drag it, it follows along nicely, only letting go of the mouse button doesn't drop it. In fact, nothing does. Instead the icon hangs onto the cursor as if I have kept holding down the mouse button. If I want to drag something to the trash, when I hover over the Trash icon and let go, it acts like I'm still holding down the mouse button and instead opens up the Trash folder. It's not limited to trash, it's just where I first noticed it. I can't move files between folders.


This pretty much happens across the board, too. Drag an icon off of the dock to remove it, it just hangs onto the mouse pointer and never goes away. Drag an icon from the icon bar at the top (command-click) and you can pick up the icon and move it, but never drop it. Is there a solution to this?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 6:11 PM

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261 replies

Feb 5, 2013 9:27 PM in response to tzargregory

I contacted AirParrot - the change from MobileMe to iCloud is what made me seek out a third party solution. I had been very happy with AirParrot, here is what they say:


  • Q I'm having issues with my screensaver activating or drag and drop issues.
  • A Unfortunately these issues are related to a bug with Apple's Nvidia drivers on earlier MacBooks. The only way to remedy this is to remove the AirParrot driveror to disable your screensaver. The following Macs will have this issue when using the External Display driver in AirParrot: MacBookPro5,5 MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009), NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, MacBookPro5,4 MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2,53 GHz, Mid 2009), NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, MacBookPro5,3 MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009) NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT and GeForce 9400M. We've provided this tool to remove the graphics driver.


Others have identified this earlier in this thread, but at 15 pages and more than 84,000 views, this obviously remains a big problem. Apple's silence on the problem and apparent reluctance to offer a fix is indeed very disappointing.


I post this in the event another newcomer to this discussion doesn't need to read through the entire thread, which took me hours...

Can't Drag and Drop Anything

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