Photoshop CC 2014: intermittent and unpredictable issues

Question

My teachers and students are using Photoshop CC 2014, a recent upgrade for us from CS6. We are on Mac OSX 10.9.4 on MacBook Air laptops.
There appears to be a very real issue relating to Layers. Images that are dragged from one window to another (rather than copied and pasted) may disappear entirely. Changes in Layer states or from background to a floating layer, may also result in lost images. My initial thought was that this was related to somehow maxing out the video memory, however that does not seem to be the case: Saving and closing, then restarting the program shows the Layers to be empty. Sometimes, however, the image Layer icon still shows the layer to have the image (but no image is appearing on the actual layer.)
Selection tools – some of the selection tools take on a life of their own and create an unpredictable selection. For instance, using the Quick Selection Tool may look relatively accurate but upon release of the mouse will turn into large stair stepped, ziggurat shaped selections that bear almost no resemblance to the original selection.
Both of the above issues seem to be sporadic and unpredictable: one student may experience once, another may experience it five times in a row, while someone else may be totally unaffected.
There are also intermittent issues of Photoshop simply shutting down.
I'm looking at the possible re-imaging and re-installation of several thousand Macs and would greatly appreciate any insights here.

Answer 1

factor path
Auto correction can be a tricky thing, huh?
When i'm copying factor path and paste on a new layer it creates a vector mask instead of just placing vector shape,
Do you mean a plain Path?
I suppose you could select/create a Path in the Paths Panel or deselect the Layer in the Layers Panel.