Sarah’s Mac recently decided that it wasn’t going to allow her to drag icons around her desktop or use the cursor to move objects within Adobe Illustrator. After a good bit of searching via Google, and browsing through Mac OS X Hints, I determined that the problem was due to the fact that coreservicesd, the process responsible for dragging and dropping, wasn’t starting when the computer booted up. So, after I tried a ton of different possible solutions, none of which worked, I finally came across the article OS X Odyssey 431 – More Nickling And Diming From Apple and Checking Out XDock Dock Utility which provided these instructions from MacFixIt reader Kevin Grant that actually solved the problem:
I have discovered the cause in my case: ‘coreservicesd’ never starts, and this might happen if the file /var/run/StartupItems/coreserviced.run already exists. This is an empty placeholder file, which apparently (if coreservicesd crashes) never gets removed.
After deleting the placeholder file, we rebooted the Mac and were pleased to find that drag and drop works again. An easy solution that was hard to find.