Can't Drag and Drop Anything

airparrot and associated kext in system/library/extensions was the problem for me. I had to relaunch finder + uninstall airparrot and kext + sleep/wake to get drag and drop back to normal. at least it's working now on my MackbookPro 2.66 Core 2 Duo OS 10.7.3. airparrot is an app that uses apple tv to mirror Mac onto tv. the drag and drop problem developed after i installed the airparrot audio software and restarted.

maybe this is unique to me, but kext in system/library/preference does seem to be a common connection.

I had the same issue, and removing AirParrot and associated .kext files solved it for me.

Bear in mind that AirParrot installs TWO .kext files: AirParrot.kext and APExtFramebuffer.kext. I missed the second one at first, and it wasn't until I removed it that the problem went away.

It's amazing how many people have had this problem. This was a frustrating problem that only happened to me after certain firmware updates to the machine. Mouse would just hold onto any file I clicked on!

Happy to say that putting the computer to sleep and awake again did work for me 🙂. Appreciate previous discussant's helpful hints.

OK,

The Sleep/Wake suggestion has [at the moment] apparently corrected the behaviour. I still suspect [as advised] that a third-party app is the problem [ I suspect AirParrot] . I am waiting to see if problem returns and have also written to AirParrot to see if they are aware of any issues.😕

Thanks for the tips.

B

I have had and reported this problem since an upgrade to Lion.

I am have never even heard of airparrot, I use displaylink though.

Do you think this is a ktext issue with USB/DVI display adapters?

Redacted, see my next reply, removing the Airparrot KEXTs fixed it for me.

FIx for me was to remove the two AirParrot KEXTs from Library/Extensions

AirParrotDriver.kext

APExtFramebuffer.kext

The AirParrot FAQ mentions my modell of MB Pro and blames the Nvidia drivers.

Really annoying, I liked that AirParrot does what it does.

Hi BillH1184,

Yes, AirParrot support has just replied to my email and advised that it because Apple's NVidia drivers don't support other third-party drivers.

No fix at this stage other than removal.

I should point out that I am having sucess when putting the machine to sleep, then waking. The cursor behaviour is restored and I can drag and drop. It is not a solution but does allow AirParrot to stay on the system, if needed.

I agree, AirParrot is a nice implementation. Mountain Lion will add this feature but for older macs, AirParrot is very handy.

Cheers

B

I exchange emails with Andrew Parrot, I encouraged him to make this problem more prominent. For now I've removed AP, I can't spend time working around this, I discovered that drag & drop comes up within Apps as well as in the Finder, it's too much bother to have this happen. I will await Mountain Lion, or Tame Lion, or Circus Lion, to provide a proper solution. Other Bill ;-)

I had AirParrot and DisplayLink and had the same drag and drop problems. I also had the problem of not getting a menu bar drop down when moving the cursor to the top edge of a fullscreen app. Additionally, Logic Pro became unusable. The controls (Play, Pause, Record, etc) were un-clickable.

I used AppZapper to remove AirParrot and manually removed its two .kext files. (AirParrotDriver.kext & APExtFramebuffer.kext)

The problem persisted.

Used the DisplayLink uninstaller (came with the .dmg) to remove it. The uninstaller forced a restart.

Problems SOLVED!

17" MBP (5,2)

10.7.3

To fix the issue with displaylink, all you have to do is either, use their work around

( known issue see displaylink for the lattest driver information )

or just put the mac to sleep and then wake it up one time after you restart.

I have this issue, and now I just do a quick sleep after restart and no need to re-install or remove anything.

Yep. The sleep routine worked for me too, but I got tired of doing that every time I restarted. As much as I commute and travel, it was a real pain in the butt.

So after waiting some months and hearing about colleagues issues with Lion - and the subsequent conversations of stability I upgraded from SL last weekend.

only to find myself hitting this issue.

of significant note, I do not have any of the offending apps installed previously mentioned.

I simply powered on the mac, and opened a folder in finder and dragged an item from the desktop to the open folder and...

what a drag. (no pun intended)

no drop.

Problem is, sleeping the mbp or force quitting finder is not a useable workaround, as I have to launch a VPN client, and sleeping the mac breaks this, forcing me to reenter my credentials every single time.

maybe a small issue but a huge oversight on Apple's part.

17"mbp 5,2 3.06GHz 8gb 480gbSSD/750GB

I had the same issue, and removing AirParrot and associated .kext files solved it for me.

Bear in mind that AirParrot installs TWO .kext files: AirParrot.kext and APExtFramebuffer.kext. I missed the second one at first, and it wasn't until I removed it that the problem went away.

I also had issues with drag and drop in OS X Lion. Although I could drag and drop within the same application, I had a lot of issues dragging and dropping into other applications. Most of the time, I would drag, switch applications (using Cmd-Tab), and find that (1) the icon of the item I was dragging would get stuck in mid-air (even if I was no longer holding down the trackpad "button"), and (2) I could actually interact with the window I was trying to drag to, e.g., I could actually type in Mail.app even though I was still holding down the trackpad button.

I did not have anything such as AirParrot, iDisplay, etc. installed, and I had no rogue kernel extensions that I could pinpoint as the cause.

In my case, it was apparently a bad com.apple.ink.framework.plist file. However, I was able to fix drag-and-drop by doing the following:

1. I first removed com.apple.ink.* from my ~/Library/Preferences folder, logged in/out, and let OS X generate a clean set of files.

2. When I logged back in, an Ink window showed up in the bottom right corner. I clicked the left-most button (the one that looks like a pen), which switched it to a mouse cursor and which I believe turns off sketching, clicked >> and went into Ink Preferences, then flipped "Handwriting Recognition" on and off a few times.

3. After logging in and out again for safe measure, drag-and-drop finally started working.

Back when I was running Snow Leopard, I had plugged in my friend's Wacom tablet for a few minutes to play with it. In the subsequent process of installing/uninstalling software for this tablet, something modified my com.apple.ink.framework.plist file in a way that later messed with drag-and-drop when I upgraded to OS X Lion.

This is probably not a permanent fix for those of you who actually use Wacom tablets, but I thought I'd share my solution with those who still have problems with drag-and-drop in the hopes that it will help you.

Additional details

I kept an old copy of my com.apple.ink.framework.plist file, converted both the new (where drag-and-drop works) and old (where it didn't) ones to ASCII text (using plutil -convert xml1) and diff'ed them against one another. The differences are:

The new file contains:

<key>inkMasterSwitchOn</key>

<false/>

which is not in the old file.

The new file contains:

<key>inkWindowVisible</key>

<true/>

whereas it was set to <false/> in the old file.

The new file contains:

<key>recognitionEnabled</key>

<false/>

whereas it was set to <true/> in the old file.

The inkServerPSN also changed numbers.