Xara, Wacom tablet and Vista 64 bit. They're all sulking.

[hamishmacd]

I’m having some odd problems with Xara and my Wacom tablet now that I’ve upgraded to Vista 64 bit.

Firstly, to put some perspective on this, there is a driver issue going on here which is probably at the root of this, but more on that later.

The problem is this, my tablet works normally in all other programmes but Xara. Indeed in Xara it works fine too but with one odd exception. When I click on a menu item, or click on, say an ‘OK ‘ button or cancel button in a dialogue box it doesn’t work. The same thing with some, although not all, of the tools on the control bar, nothing happens until I simultaneously click the button on the side of my tablet’s pen.

It’s the same, although a bit different, when trying to save a document. Within the ‘Save as’ dialogue box, the Save and Cancel buttons will only click when I also click the pen button. It gets odder. When drilling down through the folders, if I double-click on a folder to open it, this time it behaves exactly as if I’ve right-clicked on the folder and the context sensitive menu appears. Again I have to click the pen’s button to make it behave normally. The weird thing is, if I use my WACOM tablet’s mouse, everything behaves perfectly normally.

Now, I said that there was a driver issue. I downloaded the WACOM driver for 64 bit Vista. Big mistake it turns out as I can no longer get access to the WACOM control panel. When I click on it in Window’s Control Panel, the driver’s interface minimises to the task bar and won’t allow me to maximise or restore it. It only allows me to close it or minimise it (it already is minimised) or it gives me the option to move it, which of course does nothing.

I’ve tried uninstalling and re-installing the driver. I’ve even tried rolling back Vista to yesterday morning when it was a brand new, newly installed, squeaky clean installation on a brand new machine with no other programmes installed on it. Why but of course Xara was the first program I installed! Would that I would do otherwise, perish the thought.

Anyway, Wacom’s tech guys had never heard of this one before and couldn’t help me.

Has anyone here experienced anything similar?

One last thought. I mention the driver issue, but seeing as I leave all the Wacom’s settings on their defaults anyway, not being able to access their controls is something with which I can live. Well. For the mean time. The big question is, is it a driver issue at all? Xara is afterall the only programme which exhibits this odd behaviour. Everything else which is now installed is dandy.