Jo-Anne wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message
...
Jo-Anne wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message
...
Jo-Anne wrote:

Thank you again, Paul! Before I attempt anything else, I thought I'd
let
you
know that my flash drives and my external hard drives still show up
properly
and work fine plugged into this port. However, another mouse I tried--a
three-button Logitech mouse--worked only as a generic two-button mouse.
For
both the Contour mouse and the Logitech one, when I plug them into the
top
USB port and look at Mouse Properties, they show up as what they are;
when I
plug them into the bottom USB port, they show up as generic two-button
mice.

Jo-Anne
This is purely a guess at this point, but I think your touchpad software
is doing this. Either it's the touchpad software that is supposed to be
there. Or, during Windows Update, some other touchpad software was
installed.

Touchpad software is "interested" in HID devices. Your USB storage
devices
are not HID, which is why they're not affected. Keyboards and mice are
HID
devices. If you had a defective USB keyboard or a defective USB mouse,
it's the touchpad driver I'd be interested in.

Paul

But where would the wrong Touchpad software be? When I double-click on
the
Dell Touchpad icon in the system tray, it opens correctly no matter which
USB port the mouse is plugged into. But when I click on "External Mouse
Settings" in the Dell Touchpad screen, the top port shows the Contour
mouse
and the bottom port shows the generic mouse. I've been wondering if I
should
try re-installing the mouse driver while the mouse is plugged into the
"bad"
port. Is that likely to screw things up more?

Jo-Anne
We have to stop

"Doing copy-only install of "USB\VID_0000&PID_0000"

from happening first. Otherwise, the mouse driver will never get installed
on the "bad port". Some other thing has to be removed first, before the
bad
port will behave properly. That's my guess.

As long as the OS is being fooled into thinking the mouse is
VID_0000&PID_0000,
the values will never match the values listed in the INF file for the
mouse
driver. And then, the mouse driver cannot install. Once the mouse returns
real
numeric values during installation, then it's going to work. So the
thing which is hijacking the install, has to be stopped first.

My idea is just a hypothesis at this point, with little to back it up. All
I know is, that touchpad drivers are interested in "HID" or "human
interface
device" class things.

Are there any touchpad related items in the "View Hidden" part of
Device Manager ?

Paul


Yes, both the Dell Touchpad and the Perfit [Contour] Optical Mouse (USB) are
shown in View Hidden Devices.

Jo-Anne



But, are they in the "Non-Plug and Play Devices" section ?
The "Non-Plug and Play Devices" section is what I see added to Device Manager,
when selecting "View Hidden Devices".

On my laptop, I have:

Human Interface Devices
USB Input Device ---- Hardware ID VID 03EE (my Mitsumi mouse)

Mice and Other Pointing Devices
HID Compliant Mouse ---- Hardware ID VID 03EE (my Mitsumi mouse)
Synaptics PS/2 Port Touchpad ---- Hardware ID "ACPI\SYN1B17", passed in ACPI table
from the BIOS. A large driver list, from Synaptics.

Non-Plug and Play Devices ---- (Nothing Mouse or Touchpad related in here)

If there were entries related to the problem, in the Non-Plug and Play Devices
section, that would be suspicious. There are a great many items in there
on my laptop and desktop, some of which are used by programs for bypassing
permissions or the like. But at the moment, nothing HID related on my laptop
is in there.

On occasion, on my desktop, I've deleted an item from the Non-Plug
section, which I knew was no longer being used. Like perhaps
"GiveIO" used by MBM5 temperature readout program. If I know for certain,
I won't be using a thing like that again, and there isn't an actual
uninstaller to get rid of it, I may end up deleting it manually.
But I don't do that very often.

I would take finding "interesting things" in the Non-Plug and Play Devices
section, as being a side effect of whatever is wrong.

Paul