What would cause my mouse to act this way. It is a PC (Dell) running Windows 7. The mouse is a USB one with a red light in it not a ball. The left (main) button seems to be misbehaving. It seems to single or double click fine, but when I try to drag, it often stops dragging leaving the rectangle behind or stops dragging then starts again later in the move. I don’t believe it is the mouse itself as I’ve tried a second mouse that does the same thing. I don’t think it is the driver as the second mouse was an HP mouse and when I plugged it it, a new driver installed itself. It’s definitely not a specific program as the mouse misbehaves in many of them.
Ok, well the first thing to always check with a USB device is a different port. I assume you have.
If it was just one mouse it might be a ‘bouncy’ switch, and a different mouse wouldn’t do it.
I don’t know if you can somehow have a ‘bouncy’ USB port, but you could test that by enabling the ClickLock feature. If you click to drag, and it doesn’t take another click to release then you have some spurious click events being processed.
I usually run into the opposite problem where letting go of the button doesn’t release.
Just a follow-up. A friend suggested that the problem might be another input device was creating a conflict. At his suggestion I subbed a different keyboard and the problem seems to have gone away. He said there may have been something causing the keyboard to send a key which interrupted the mouse.
Makes sense to me. I once had a mouse with a scroll wheel that went crazy erratic; problem turned out to be a bread crumb jammed under the keyboard’s wheel.
AFAIK the only keyboard key that interrupts a mouse drag is Escape, and you certainly would have noticed if your keyboard was sending bad Escape presses every so often.
I just tried an experiment and pressing the windows key will interrupt a mouse drag just as an ESC does (but it also pops up the start menu). The menu key on the right hand side will “lock” a mouse drag at your current spot.