MS Intellimice optical 'shutting down' anyone?

[Andre Costa]

Hi,

I've been experiencing lately some weird mouse behavior: all of a
sudden, mouse simply goes off, and even though X11 remains responsive
(keyboard works), it usually leaves me no option besides killing X11
with CTRL+ALT+BKSP -- which often makes me lose some work. Restarting X
brings mouse back up again, as if nothing had happened.

Mouse is MS IntelliMouse Wheel Optical, graphics board is a GeForce4
Ti4200, XFree is latest version (4.3.0-55), NVidia drivers are also
latest (5336).

I can't really precise if this started happening after latest X update
-- been using this configuration for a while already, and never
experienced any such problems. Also, problem doesn't seem to be
repeatable on windoze on the same machine.

It could of course be a hardware (mouse) problem, but I would like to
know if anyone had any similar experience -- or has any black-magic
procedure to make X "re-probe" the mouse...

TIA

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa