Cannot select tools...

Hi, I am getting a weird behavior in Photoshop CS4. I have tried to find anyone who may have experience the issue before but I couldn't find much info on the web or this forum... but if someone already brought this up, sorry for the extra post.
I will be working in PS CS4 for a while and all of a sudden, when I try to select any tools, the only one that I get will be the eraser, which will have a huge size (about a third of my canvas, no matter what the canvas size is). Since I am working on the background, it creates huge white circles.
At first, I thought that PS may think that the space bar or any other key was being pressed, but if I hit the spacebar multiple times, it doesn't help to get the tools to work as they should again. I then try to restart the application but even this doesn't help.
The only way I can get PS to work correctly again is to reboot the system. After the system gets back up, I may be able to work for a couple of hours before the problem comes back. Sometimes, I could work just for a few minutes and the issue comes back... it is very random.
There is one thing I haven't tried yet, it is to reset my preferences by lauching the app with option+command+shift. Maybe there is something wrong with them. So right now, I am able to work without any issues, so I will continue what I am doing. But as soon as I get the issue again (very confident that it will show his face again today), I will try to reset my preferences.
But if anyone has any other ideas to throw my way, feel free to do so.
Thanks,
Rene

Hey everyone,
So I got the eraser only issue again and I decided to look at the RAID Utilities to see if I had a bad drive that may be causing this issue...
But all my RAID drives are working perfectly, there are no bad drives at all. So then I quit the Utilities and returned to Photoshop to find that my tool was now correctly selected!
So it appears that starting a different software/apple utilities seems to fix the issue. I have not been having the issue again for the last 15 hours... but again, the Photoshop artist working on the system just came back about 4 hours ago... but still, no issue since mid-afternoon Yesterday. So that is a good thing.
One more thing, I have checked the Wacom drivers and we have the latest and greatest version of the tablet drivers installed on that system. What I could try if this happens again would be to downgrade to a earlier version of the Wacom drivers.
If I get this issue again I will post what I have done to make it better again! In case it helps someone else.
Thanks,
Rene

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