The tablet driver for the Wacom Tablet occasionally crashes under Mac OS X. This seems to happen more often after the machine is woken from Sleep mode.

When you look in the Preference you will see some warning similar to the image above. The only solution it offers is to restart the Mac. This is a pain even though restarting with and SSD is quick enough it still means closing all the open apps and waiting an age for some to close like the Mail.app (seriously Apple how hard is it to fix this nonsense).

Luckily there is an alternative, if you open the Activity monitor and search for Wacom you should see something similar to the screen shot below. The TabletDriver is the one that crashes, with me at least, oddly enough the TouchDriver seems more stable.

So if you are seeing an unresponsive warning in the dialog or the warning mentioned previously in the System Preferences you will need to select the TabletDriver in the list and click on the X button on the top right. From the select Force Quit, Quit general will not work with unresponsive apps anyway.

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Once the WacomTabletDriver is shutdown it will no longer show up in the list as below:

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To restart the driver you need to go to the:

/Library/Application Support/Tablet/WacomTabletDriver/Contents/MacOS/

as shown below:

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To start the driver just double click the icon as you would any other app. This will open a Terminal window and run from there. You can close the window after it has run. It make then restart the driver one more time as the Terminal Process is closed but it should work fine.

Now head back to System Preferences and ope the Wacom pane, you should see the familiar settings have returned:

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This may seem a little long winded from the article description but you can do it fairly quickly I would also recommend making a Desktop shortcut for the WacomTabletDriver exec so you would only need to click this to start the driver. All in all a lot quicker and sane than restarting your Mac because one Driver has lost its tiny mind.