panels had ignoreclick flag set, which at least in Max 6 excludes them from hover reporting. Changing that, and simple switch that uses name of mouse clicked object and mouse released object does the rest

I did not touch the rest of the patch. I would prefer this one though :

I forgot the panel highlighting - that should be easy enough, now that hover reports them. Change brgb when over it, change back when mouse leaves them.

Thanks @Source Audio! You always have a way of finding good solutions for my posts! :-)

And yes - I was being an idiot and forgot to adjust ignoreclick on all my panels (they were copied from another patch) - that obviously helps with the hover-ing! I also see what you did in your adjusted version, with the delay added in. That was also on my to-do list (why I said my original patch was not perfect) - I want to try and avoid any highlighted red box from showing if the user just clicks a cell, and does not drag it. Your version still does this, even if I increase the delay amount - will work on that some later, not critical for now.

I'll probably convert your additions into abstractions that I can feed the object names into, so that I can generalize things as I indicated above.

Thanks again!

You can change that red box appearing simply watching mouse position, and alowing red box to show only when mouse is clicked and from that point mouse position changed ...

while trying this, I realised that while mouse is down hover object does not report . That makes highlighting the panels when one drags over a bit more complicated. One would have to split mouse coordinates and use that instead in oposite way : only when mouse is in set range and held down, panel gets highlighted. Now one needs to distinguish between patching and presentation mode which seems not possible using any messages or scripting. well if all were that easy where would be the fun to get things work ?

Haha, yeah, the joy of Max'ing! Appreciate your help once again.