The IT guys came by today with my new computer and Photoshop CS3. I'd done some reading about the upgrade-not nearly enough, but I was able to keep working as I re-learned the application.

One thing vexes me though: When I specify a feather on the freehand lasso tool it doesn't behave like it would in CS2. Specifically, lasso feather of 15 seems to select with the same edge as lasso feather of 1.

I played around with the new selection tool, and I agree that it is useful, but I still want the freehand lasso to work the way it used to. Am I missing a setting or check box or something? Please help!

if they did change the lasso tool i have yet to see the difference, maybe you need to reset your photoshop preferences or upgrade to photoshop 10.0.1...

There are some known issues with CS3 about numbers entered in the options bar for such things as feathering, crop size etc. The "bug" is that CS3 retains the last input numbers and reverts to them even when you enter new values. Should be fixed in next major update. Work around is to quit Photoshop and relaunch.

Yes, I noticed today that the problem is intermittent. I'm going to love relaunching every time this happens-not! I'll try reseting preferences too. Thanks for the quick replies!