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Yeek! A Crazy Mouse!

Members of the ISP-Tech list offer common sense suggestions for dealing with a customer's mouse that's jumping all over the place. Solutions range from the basic to the esoteric.

[November 20, 2001]

On the ISP-Tech list in October, KP queried,

"I have a client whose mouse sometimes stops working, and at other times it goes crazy, jumping all over the place. Any ideas on what could be wrong?"

A number of respondents noted that it sounded like a virus:

[DD warned] "The Magistr virus does this in the final stages, just before it starts deleting files. It will also hide itself from McAfee and Norton, if the machine becomes infected before the updates to find it are installed. We usually have to install another scanner to find it and fix it, if that's the case."

[BK observed] "It sounds like a virus that appeared a little over a year ago. Do a virus detection with the latest virus definition files."

[TS added] "A recent virus came in an email saying it contained porn. The virus was developed by a politically active women's movement at a German University: it made the mouse go limp…"

Others offered some alternate suggestions:

[HH recalled] "I had a mouse go crazy once. The OS automatically configured it as an IntelliMouse, but it was a normal two-button mouse. I had to manually load the proper drivers to fix it. I still don't know why the autoconfigure would insist on loading the IntelliMouse drivers."

[DH suggested] "I'd check to see if it's on the same COM port or interrupt as something else."

[AL offered] "This usually happens because of a dodgy switch box, i.e. three PCs hooked up to the same keyboard/mouse/screen using KVM switches. Have you tried to reload the mouse drivers, tried a different mouse on that machine, and tried that mouse on a different machine? The first thing to do is to figure out whether it's a software issue or a hardware issue."

—End