This morning I re-installed Windows XP because some of my programs (like Windows Media Player) had somehow disappeared. After that, everything worked fine, so I went to Windows update to reload the patches. After I installed Service Pack 1a I rebooted and my mouse no longer worked.
I used system restore to go back before the service pack and the mouse worked again. Re-installed the service pack – no mouse. I even re-reloaded XP (mouse worked) and then did the service pack again. No mouse.
I have installed the service pack on this machine before, and there was never any problem.
FTR it’s a Microsoft Optical Mouse, and I have tried it in both the USB and PS2 modes.
Has anyone seen this problem before, or know of a way to fix it?
Right click My Computer, select Properties, select Hardware tab and click on Device Manager. Any device depicted as a question mark means that it is not correctly installed. This might be the problem.
However, my guess is that the mouse is broken. A mouse not working in USB mode is quite common (service pack sometimes screws the USB ports), but not working in PS/2 mode is highly unlikely.
This is way strange. I tried the mouse both in USB mode and PS2 mode, and rebooted several times with no success. In fact the device manager didn’t even show a mouse installed. I tried the Add New Hardware Wizard, but it didn’t find the mouse either.
This morning, I unplugged the mouse and plugged a different one in. XP immediately recognized the mouse. I plugged the original mouse back in, and it now works fine.
Sounds like plugging in the different one forced the system to refresh the driver (which might appear to have been the case with troubleshooting the old one) - I’ve seen similar things with other items of hardware such as network cards - do something to the system and it stops working, resists all attempts to fix etc. Install a different one and it works, then (on a whim)replace the original one and everything is back to normal.