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UI Elements

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Posted on by spalumbo

I had a desktop flow working smoothly with multiple steps, subflows, etc. As of the middle of last week (April 25th or so), Power Automate stopped recognizing a number of my existing UI elements. Instead of recognizing dropdown menu items, it only recognizes the overall program as a pane. I am running both PA and the application as Administrator, but haven't had any success in recovering recognition of the elements. I've seen a few posts on here with similar issues, but none of those resolutions has worked for me. Has anyone experienced a similar issue lately? UI elements not found and Java UI Elements not recognized look very similar to the issue I'm seeing, for context.

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Power Automate Desktop

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CU16071609-1 6,255 Moderator on at

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@spalumbo
Have you recently updated your PAD version? Is this issue occurring after the update?
Or has there been any recent update to your source application?

In the meantime, If this is something happening after PAD upgrade, then consider to downgrade and see whether that downgrade resolves your issues?

Thanks,
Deenuji Loganathan 👩‍💻
Automation Evangelist 🤖
Follow me on LinkedIn 👥

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spalumbo 11 on at

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@Deenuji - thanks for the advice. I don't know if there was an update or not; if so it was an automatic one. What is the process for rolling back to an earlier version? I don't see that anywhere in the app, but if it would help I'm definitely willing to try.
CU16071609-1 6,255 Moderator on at

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@spalumbo

Ah, I understand. I would suggest reaching out to Microsoft and requesting access to the older, more stable versions such as 2.41 or 2.39. If that isn't possible at the moment, I've sent you a private message with a link to download the older version. You can try downgrading and see if it resolves your issue.

Thanks,
Deenuji Loganathan 👩‍💻
Automation Evangelist 🤖
Follow me on LinkedIn 👥

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eetuRobo 4,587 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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I don't think PAD updates automatically. Someone needs to okay it. If it would update automatically it would be pretty big risk for anyone running flows in production.

Do you know if the application your PAD is using has been updated? That might be a reason why PAD is not able to recognize the UI elements anymore.

Did the flows fail and you are not able to pick the UI elements again? and new UI elements just gives "Pane"? Or does the old UI elements not fail but just select the pane?
If you are not able to select the UI elements then only things I can think of is that you either try to create Script like VBScript if that works with the program you are using or use Mouse and keyboard actions like Move mouse to image or Move mouse to text on screen (OCR).

I assume the program doesn't have web portal so you could automate it in browser? If there is a web portal for the application then recreate the flow using browser actions.
spalumbo 11 on at

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@Deenuji , the installer didn't let me install an older version of PAD. @eetuRobo, our app didn't have an update in the intervening time, so I really have no idea what happened. I was able to use the Move mouse to image actions to replicate the functions that had stopped working, so I think that's what I'll go with for now. Thanks to both of you for the advice on this!