Eyedropper tool selects wrong colour?

I've had this problem intermittently for a couple of months now and I've had no luck in resolving it. Sometimes restarting the program resolves it but only temporarily. I'm using the latest version of PS CC 2014.
The eyedropper tool is not selecting the correct colour. I'm definitely sampling from the current layer; I've even tried selecting a colour from a solid background and it's still wrong. The only way I can get the correct colour is to click the colour picker/foreground and select it the long way. That's a real pain.
For example right now, I have a 50% gray background. If I use the eyedropper tool, I get 9f9f9f but if I use the colour picker I get the correct 808080. Why is this happening? How can I fix it?
Many thanks!

Hello gener7, thank you for replying quickly!
I've tried changing my sampling size but this doesn't make a difference, particularly because this occurs even if I'm sampling from a solid colour. With hope, I tried your suggestion of resetting the tool but unfortunately that didn't work either.
I've just quit PS and restarted it and hey! it's working properly again (for now!). I don't call this a "fix" though because it shouldn't be happening in the first place and it's really annoying to have to keep restarting, especially when I'm in "the zone".

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Eyedropper tool selects wrong colour?

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