Looks like there a patch out for PSE9
The Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 9.0.1 update will install a patch on top of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. It provides a fix to the Spot Healing Brush when used in Content Aware mode. This update is ONLY applicable to Photoshop Elements 9 running on a Windows OS
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4913