Wacom Vista Problems (& how to overcome them!)

I hadn’t used my Wacom tablet for a while and plugged it in today and encountered my first real problems with it. I first noticed that the pen wasn’t pressure sensitive in Photoshop and then I noticed that the pen would only work in Photoshop! I had a quick play with the settings and discovered that it would work in ‘Mouse Mode’ but not in ‘Pen Mode’ which I needed.

My first step was to download the latest drivers (I should mention that I use Vista 32bit at this point.) Uninstalling the drivers and upgrading to the latest ones didn’t help.

After quick 5 minute Google I found a post recommending that problems can occur when you install the driver and that the config file can become corrupted. So I followed the instructions, uninstalled the drivers and deleted any relevant wacom .dat files that I found on my system, namely ‘Wacom.dat’ and ‘Wacom_Tablet.dat’ and the reinstalled the drivers… No change! Time for a new approach!

I found a recent post from Wacom Support their own Wacom Europe forums – here.

You can just go to device manager and disable the ‘WacomVirtualHID’ device and restart, or (disable the service TabletPC Input service). Most likely the tablet will work as usual, but Vista will not see a pen input device and not offer the pen functionality like flicks and pen handwriting recognition.

Worked like a charm! So it seems this is a Windows Vista Tablet bug rather than a bug in the Wacom drivers afterall.

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