Okay this is going to be a doozy.
One day last week, I opened up Cubase to find that the Shift+Mouse Scroll wasn’t working, (supposed to navigate the project horizontally). It simply scrolled up and down. Also, the Ctrl+Mouse Scroll (supposed to zoom in and out of project), did the same thing; scrolled up and down. In addition to this, I couldn’t click and drag the scroll bars. They wouldn’t move. I also couldn’t click and drag a selection box within the project.
I troubleshooted a lot of things, so I’ll try to make this as short as possible:
-Ctrl and Shift worked outside of Cubase. Going into a web browser, I was able to zoom with Ctrl+Mouse wheel. So, the issue was definitely happening within Cubase.
-To determine if Ctrl or Shift was even registering within Cubase, I tried copying and pasting and event within my project. (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) It didn’t work, which told me it was those keys specifically that were causing and issue.
-After researching online for troubleshooting advice, it was recommended to update Cubase. Even though the issue randomly started without any sort of update within Cubase, I figured it was worth a try. I had been using Cubase 13 and downloaded Cubase 14 and tried opening up my project in Cubase 14. The same issue occurred.
-To test if my project files were corrupted, I tried opening a blank Cubase project. I noticed that when I first opened it, I was able to click and drag the scroll bars and click and drag a selection box within the project, but as soon as I tried pressing Ctrl or Shift, the scroll bars would freeze up again, and I wasn’t able to click and drag a selection box within the project.
Potential/Current Solution:
Running Cubase as administrator fixed the issue. I also went into the properties of the file to always run as administrator on startup. The last time I had some random, inexplainable issue within Cubase was because I needed to update my computer. In this case, I think it was because of an update that had occurred. My best guess is that because of the update, maybe some new program is running in the background on Cubase startup, which interferes with the Cubase interface, or key commands. Running as administrator overrode that. This is just a hypothesis though, but the issue is fixed for now, so I’ll mark it as solved. If anyone has any insight about this, feel free to share.
I suspect this Windows update to be the culprit, as the other recent updates were simply security updates: 2026-04 Preview Update (KB5083631) (26200.8328)
May the force be with you.