Disable “Press and Hold” in Windows XP SP3 and Wacom Tablets

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Press and hold behavior in Windows XP SP3
Press and hold

The “press and hold” for right click is driving me up the walls while using the Adobe Creative Suite at work, so while it’s pretty easy to find a solution for Vista/Win7, the solution for Windows XP SP3 is bit harder to find, so I’ll make it available for everybody here.

From the Wacom forums:

“What you see is an effect of the Windows ‘TabletPC Input’ or pen inking system. This is part of XP TabletPC edition, Vista and some part of it is also enabled in XP with SP3. The effect is called ‘Press and Hold to Rightclick’. In Vista you can disable this option the the ‘TabletPC Input’ control panel. For XP SP3 you can either use a registry editor and change the key
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Pen\SysEventParameters]
“HoldMode”=dword:00000003

You can instead also disable the service ‘TabletPC Input Service’ or go to device manager and disable the WacomVirtualHID. This does not effect the normal tablet operation, but Windows will not activate the pen inking in this case.”

I hope this helps!

By Luca Candela

Born in Italy, after a MS in Computer Science in Torino, Italy, I moved to Madrid first, then to California to pursue my dream of working in the epicenter of the digital revolution, the Bay Area. I'm currently the Head of Product Management at Treasure Data. I'm passionate about Agile development, User Experience and social media. In the rare occasion when I'm not working, I like to play electric guitar, ride my mountain bike and enjoy Asian food.

5 comments

  1. You said it is simple to disable this irritating feature in Vista/7? I’m having trouble accomplishing just that! Perhaps you could enlighten me?

    Reply

  2. Sorry to post again, but I forgot to mention that I’m using The eeePC T91 which is a touchscreen tablet, not a peripheral device such as a Wacom.

    Reply

  3. The registry hack worked great for me as far as I can tell. I have been dealing with this in One note for a long time. Every other method seems to disable inking which defeats the purpose of having a tablet in the first place. I would like the pen button combined with TAP to still work as the right click though. What happens now is the second pen button IS the right click. IOW I don't get the option to TAP with the button engaged. Do you know a hack to make this work as it's supposed to? System is a laptop with built in wacom tablet (3"x5") windows XP Pro latest SP. If it were tablet edition I'd know what to do. The tablet control panel is missing the usual options (I also own a 12" tablet computer so I'm accustomed to the normal tablet options). Please contact me if you know the cure.
    pro audio guy at yahoo dot com You know what to do…..

    Thanks

    Reply

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