Jumping erratic mouse

[Tom Lafleur]

Knowledge Base 185663, 321122 articles concerning Mouse
pointer moving erratically and jumping all over the
screen. This is a problem on NT, XP, Win2000 and Win2003

After spending two week tracing a jumping mouse problem
for a customer on two computer system. Using the above
article that did not solve the problem...

Computer has a GPS system connected to a serial port...
What was happening is that the system on boot up would
see a sequence of data from the GPS and interpret this as
a MOUSE and would attach a mouse driver to the port.

Random data from the GPS would build a valid "mouse
packet" and the mouse would jump...

Fix is too disabling serial mouse devices at boot time..
see below: There also may be a Registry Key that will do
the same...

Unplug the GPS from the system
Disabling serial mouse devices by doing the following:
Right click My Computer
Select Properties
Select Advanced Tab
Select Settings in Startup and Recovery
Select Edit
add /NoSerialMice (this is case sensitive) to the line
that looks like:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\XP="Windows
XP" /fastdetect
so that it now reads:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\XP="Windows
XP" /fastdetect/NoSerialMouse
File -> Exit Save yes
OK
and reboot
Once rebooted re attach your GPS.

[Dave VanHorn]

> Computer has a GPS system connected to a serial port...
> What was happening is that the system on boot up would
> see a sequence of data from the GPS and interpret this as
> a MOUSE and would attach a mouse driver to the port.

Isn't plug and play wonderful?

Disabling serial mice may or may not work.
I had this happen, and even though serial mice were disabled, it kept
installing the MS ballpoint mouse driver. Worse, it didn't mark the port as
in use, so I wasn't aware this was happening.
FWIW, I didn't get "psycho-mouse"
My solution was to use edgeport devices, which have a driver setting to
forbid plug and play discovery.

I've also seen "psycho-mouse" happen with other systems, like the RealEMwin
feed at the county EOC. That was great fun.. In that case, it thought the
EMWin feed was a logitech mouse.