Fixing Wacom Driver Problems in Windows 7

Just a quick post about my adventures/misadventures in Windows 7. There's been reports about problems with the Wacom drivers not working after restarting Windows 7, and I've ran into it as well. When going to the Wacom Tablet Properties it'll show a scary message saying, "THE TABLET DRIVER WAS NOT FOUND." This happened to me on my Cintiq 12WX. Reinstalling the driver made it work again, but once I restarted it stopped working. I researched a fix for the issue but it was either too complicated for me to bother trying or didn't work at all.

This behavior began about a month after I installed Windows 7, and I think playing around with the tablet PC features in Windows 7 (which, by the way, has really good handwriting recognition), may have been what caused it, like Windows 7 was taking over the tablet driver or something.

Anyway, suspecting that Windows 7's Tablet PC stuff was causing the problem I tried this and it fixed the problem:
  1. Reinstall the Wacom driver again so the tablet works (no need to uninstall the driver, in fact I'm not even sure if this step is actually necessary).
  2. Load msconfig
  3. Go to the Services tab.
  4. Find the "Tablet PC Input Service" (sorting the services alphabetically may help you find it easier) and then hit the checkbox to disable it.
  5. Restart Windows 7.
  6. Tablet should work!

Of course if you actually use the Tablet PC features in Windows 7 then this won't be the fix for you, but it's straightforward and got rid of the offending service.

Comments

BonFire said…
Thanks pal for the post! I have sucked with the issue for three days. The Windows Tablet PC service caused the problem, indeed. Now, I didn't install the drivers from CD, but I downloaded from the official site of Wacom, and it works perfectly now.

However, as long as the installer worked I didn't connect the tablet into my PC because I didn't want that Windows Plug & Pray start and mess up everything.
April 17, 2012 at 4:40 AM
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