[MAYA 2025.2] Outliner Reordering Broken - "Node has locked children" Error

[jozwikch]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone else encountered this in Maya 2025.2? When trying to reorder ANY objects in the Outliner (even fresh polygons in new scenes), I get this error:

"Error: line 1: Node '' has locked children and cannot be reordered."

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open Maya 2025.2
2. New scene
3. Create any polygon
4. Try to middle-mouse drag to reorder in Outliner
5. Error appears

I've tried:
- Clean Maya preferences
- Disabled all plugins
- Both Outliner UI and cmds.reorder()
- Different object types
- Fresh scenes

This is blocking our pipeline since we can't reorganize hierarchies. Same error occurs via Python:

cmds.reorder('objectName', relative=1)

Anyone found a workaround or having the same issue? This seems like a new bug in 2025.2.

Build info: Maya 2025.2
OS: Windows 10

Thanks in advance!

[nelsoncruz]

Based on the title and description it sounds like you are trying to re-order a locked node?

My repro steps:
polyPlane;
select -r pPlane1 ;
lockNode -l on
reorder -relative -1 pPlane1 ;

// Error: line 1: Node '' has locked children and cannot be reordered.

This does not seem to be a regression but a expected behaviour based on my tests.  Can you confirm if Unlocking the node will help by selecting one of the nodes and running "lockNode -l off"

[jozwikch]

Thanks for the quickly reply!

This is happening with completely fresh nodes, no locks applied. Here's what we've found:

Test case:
- Fresh Maya 2025.2 scene
- Create new polygon (any type)
- Try to middle-mouse drag in outliner to reorder
- Get error: "Node '' has locked children and cannot be reordered"

We've confirmed:
- lockNode -l off has been tried, doesn't fix it
- Happens with any new objects, no locks applied
- lockNode shows nodes are not locked
- Only affects root-level reordering, sorting and grouping still work fine

I replicated your set of steps and got the same outcome but the behavior differs from the locked node case you described.

Thanks again!

[damaggio]

I don't see this behavior, it's working fine here in my scenes.

[nelsoncruz]

Its not clear as to what could be going on with your setup. I followed your steps and I cannot reproduce the issue either.  A few others on my end have also tried but no luck.

[jozwikch]

We figured it out! With this issue we were also expiercing a seperate issue with these UNKNOWN_REF_NODEs popping into the scene with the occasional SpacePivotMouse child. They could be deleted but would keep coming back everytime the scene was reopened. From the post below we found SpacePivotMouse was related to the 3D Connexion software. After completely removing the application, both problems were resolved.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/spacemouse-and-centering-orbit/td-p/6270385

[lodej73]

We're getting the same error in our scenes using Maya 2023.2 and 2024.

[zacharymichaelparker]

Wow, this totally solved my issue, thanks for that! Probably not many people that actually use the Space Mouse. I was having the exact same trouble as you but in Maya 2022. I uninstalled the software and everything worked normal after. Have you tried reinstalling yet? I tried an update before uninstalling, but to no avail. I haven't had an issue since I bought it 2 years ago and have been using it on multiple machines, so not sure if something just got corrupted or what. Thanks for sharing your problem and solution!

[zacharymichaelparker]

An added update to this issue. I tried reinstalling the 3D Connexion software again, and the same issue was happening where the children were locked and the objects could not be re-ordered in the outliner. Frustrating, I only noticed it starting after recent updates to the software. So I uninstalled again and I went back to an older version of the software, v10.8.18. There is no longer an issue, re-ordering works perfectly. I'm going to have to submit a bug report to the 3D Connexion team, this is a bad one.