Hi,

My Microsoft Optical Explorer 1.1 has proved to be a trusty and hardy companion over the past 2 years. I have dropped it countless times, even spilt a cup of soup on it once, and yet the wee thing continued to give me excellent service, until the past couple of days, that is...

All of a sudden, a very annoying glitch has appeared. The mouse seems to randomly drop off. Usually, this is accompanied by the laser light turning off and the hardware disconnect sounding on Windows XP. Usually, it will reconnect and return to normal service within a few seconds, but sometimes I have to physically unplug the thing and replug it to get it working.

The mouse is plugged into a USB port on my keyboard (which has also served me well for 2 years). I tried using it in other USB ports to no avail.

I have had my suspicions that my system is becoming increasingly unstable - I have had several random system crashes in the past few weeks. I fear that I may have accidentally damaged the motherboard when I recently installed a new soundcard. However, I believe the mouse problem is unrelated to this - it has only started in the past couple of days, as I say...

Does anyone have any experience of this type of problem? I'm reluctant to go out and buy a new mouse in case it turns out to be a USB port / motherboard / XP problem...

this could be a multitude of things, from bad mouse driver, failing mother board (doubt its that) Virus, trojan, or.. dead mouse.

check your pc for viri, spyware.
update your drivers,

and if you can.. try the mouse in another PC for a bit.

Thanks for the reply, Father Jack!

It isn't a virus or spyware problem, I have swept my hard disk for that.

Reinstalling/updating the drivers didn't make any difference.

I have found people with similar problems to the one I describe elsewhere on the web, but can't find any satisfactory explanation or solution anywhere...

I'm going to see if I can try using the mouse on another PC (which is a hassle as I don't have one in the house) but I am beginning to suspect that I'll need to buy a new mouse.

I'll keep the forum posted, and if anyone else has any ideas I'd be glad to hear them!

I had that exact problem with my first Intellimouse Explorer, and it finally died. I later found out the cord had shorted out and that this is a very common problem with the early models. Microsoft sent me a free replacement when I contacted them about it.

Just a thought but hey if it works, rejoice. If the mouse is PS2/USB, try to connect it to the PS2 Mouse port instead and see if it makes any difference.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

In the end, since nothing else worked, I went out bought a new MS optical mouse, which has worked fine for the past two weeks without a glitch.

I've got an intellipoint and wireless multimedia keyboard connected via USB to the wireless receiver. It has taken me 5 minutes to type this message coz every few seconds there is some kind of glitch that hangs the mouse pointer movement and stalls the keyboard input. Sometimes it makes the keyboard go mental and repeat the last typed character loads.

When the glitch occurs, if you have F lock, or Num lock on, then the light on the base station will go out momentarily.

Quite often, if the computer is asleep, you can't wake it.

Tried new batteries, using it elsewhere, closer to base, new BIOS, new drivers, different USB ports etc etc. Any other ideas?

Cheers, Candles.

Solved it. Got rid of the Microsoft piece of crap and bought a logitech wireless mouse and keyboard combo. Works perfectly.