TrackPad physical click not working after upgrade to Mountain Lion

My 2012 retina macbook pro wakes from sleep or occationally crashes and the trackpad appears to be held down by an invisible force... this is particularly frustrating as many applications are difficult to save or close without a mouse on a Mac.

Fixes: If i put the computer to sleep and wake from sleep repeatedly I get a few seconds of clicking, then failures again. Repetition of this sleep attempts seem to get back on track.

Quite a feature. Restarting has not solved it. What i thought was surely hardware to be terrible software error. This is running osx 10.8.3.

eshute: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!! Yesterday all of a sudden my trackpad went wonky. Wouldn't click or respond at all. Saw your suggestion to clean it and VOILA, it's clicking and working like new!!! Truly amazing.

To the poster that mentioned the battery. Mine is showing "replace soon". It will still charge for a 2 hours usage. I won't really need a better charge until June and thought I'd wait 'til then to replace it. Bad idea? I sure don't want it affecting other things like you said.

One last thing. The scrolling is backward now. I remember it being like that before but can't remember how I changed it. How do I change it so when I scroll down on the pad the page scrolls down instead of up?

Thanks to everyone!!

Oh shoot, I meant to ask: will a wireless mouse work when the trackpad doesn't? Just in case this would happen again and cleaning it doesn't fix it.

Also, I figured out how to change the scroll direction.

I had this same issue, and it turned out to be that the switch on my bluetooth mouse had flipped on in my laptop bag and was "clicked".

+1, spent the better part of 30minutes trying to figure out what was going on. Figured the builtin trackpad wasn't working so went to grab the external one. The second I started reaching out for it, it hit me. Needless to say, I feel like an idiot.

I had the same problem and solved it by unchecking all the options from "More Gestures" under System Preferences / Trackpad.

before doing anything else check trackpad settings i.e. under trackpad gestures check clicking, dragging, tap using two fingers etc

Thank you. This was what solved it. I hope a lot of people see your comment. Before this, I unscrewed my laptop (And I have the old archaic one)...and when I got to the battery, the screws were held on too tight. i wanted to just take it out for a few seconds. I was about to just buy a new one till i saw your comment, so thank you!

Hi guys I know its been three years but I also had the problem, started tinkering around in System Preferences, and found something in Accessibility>Mouse and Trackpad. Turn off the "Spring Loaded Delay" setting. I am currently on El Capitan 10.11.6 but I think it should work for older firmwares. Cheers

I'm having the same exact problem! Did you guys find any solution?