Help before I go into a violent rage (Mac Cursor/click issue)

Factual Questions
1

Help. I’m going to get violent soon.

Over the past week, something has been happening to my cursor/mouse control. As much as I can tell, I have not detected a pattern in what triggers it, but suddenly, in the blink of an eye, my ability to click disappears. I can move the cursor all over the place, but no clicking. None.

I normally use a Wacom BamBoo, using the pen as my mouse (repetitive stress injury like I never dreamed I could suffer. If I use a mouse for ten minutes I’m in agony), so I thought it might be that. I disconnected it, connected a Mac mouse. Nope. Problem remains.

Yesterday when it happened I just started quitting things as best I could (force quit or command tab then quit) and I was so frustrated and pissed I didn’t notice that my clicking had returned.

So today when it happened I was more controlled. Quit…test. Quit… test… Quit… test. I quit right down to the finder and then I relaunched the finder. No help. The only way I got it back was by pressing hte button on the front of the computer (Mac Pro first generation tower running Snow Leopard for months) to restart because I don’t knw the key combo to restart.

I find this absolutely maddening and infuriating and yes, it enrages me. The only thing that really drives me into a rage is technical snafus that I can’t understand or control. I get sort of psycho around that kind of thing.

So please, if you have any ideas, HELP.

2

I don’t have a solution, but I feel your pain. Mac problems are so rare that when one occurs it’s like a law of nature has been violated.

3

Have you taken a look at your settings in System Preferences -> Hardware -> Mouse or System Preferences -> System -> Universal Access? Every once in a rare while when I’ve had a problem, somehow the settings have been changed/reverted to the default setting.
I imagine you’ve run Disk Utility and Repair Disk Permissions.
You could try plugging the Wacom into a different USB port. A real long shot might be that a wire in the USB cable has kinked/broken and makes intermittent contact, I’ve had that happen with a mouse.

4

See if disconnecting your keyboard makes the problem go away.

5

You might look at the Wacom drivers. I see that there was an update released in November of last year at http://www.wacom.com/downloads/drivers.php

Snow Leopard caused issues with quite a few third-party drivers; since you’ve been fine for months, that might not be it, but I’d start there.

Are you anywhere near an Apple Store? The Geniuses may not exactly be geniuses, but they are pretty good at solving problems like this.

6

Sounds like it could be dirty. I don’t know which Apple mouse you have, but regardless, clean it. Open it if you can and blow out any dust, ideally with one of those little canisters they sell. But you can use your mouth. Afterwards, with a clean cloth wipe the area around the sensor. That worked for me. And yes, it is VERY frustrating.

Good luck.

7

Could also be an old mouse driver that she doesn’t use anymore. I had an uneccessary Logitech ‘control center’ or some such esconced in my System Prefs panels. It had a memory leak, and caused problems every week or two. Getting rid of it fixed the problem.