The quick story is, completely out of the blue, my laptop computer is not detecting my USB mouse in any way at all. It has been working fine, without previous trouble, and now it does not detect it, not on the device manager, not under the mouses, and not with the install new hardware wizard. So I am relegated to the touchpad mouse. I tried unplugging the USB mouse, replugging it, restarting the computer, shutting down the computer, tried different USB ports (which certainly work, since I just had my Mp3 player plugged into one that I tested, and that worked fine). The optical USB mouse still has that blue laser light on, and it illuminates when I move it around, but my computer does not care or acknowledge. I don't have another mouse/computer I can test out, and am not too keen to buying another one.
The long story is... I share this computer with two other people mostly. I don't know what they do on it. Probably nothing too sinister, but regardless of intention, over the past day or so there have been problems. Yesterday, it began when the Windows Welcome screen and fast user switching were mysteriously disabled, so the computer went with the old "classic" login.
I'm pretty sure that when I established the two other accounts on the computer, I made them limited accounts (not POSITIVE about this), and suddenly they were administrator accounts. Hmm. I went to my account, and returned them to limited account status. When I tried to turn the Welcome Screen back on, it told me I had to uninstall Client Services for Netware. I did so, and things seemed to be working. I ran all the virus detecting software on this computer (admittedly not much, since this has been my "minimal use" computer - my "main" computer is out of commission right now): Norton, AdAware, AVG. None of these programs turned up with anything significant, although I can't help but feel some foul play is afoot.
Now today the Welcome Screen and so on seem to work; most everything seems normal. But now the computer does not respond to or detect the USB mouse. In between the time I restored my Welcome Screen, and now, the mouse HAD been working, but now that I return home from work it doesn't.
I checked all of the USB ports in the device manager, and they are in working order.
I am on Windows XP Media Center Edition Version 2002 SP 2.