MS Intellimice optical 'shutting down' anyone?

[Andre Costa]

On Tue, 09 Mar 2004 22:55:02 -0500
Travis Fraser <travis at snowpatch.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 22:08, Andre Costa wrote:
> > 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
> > 
> I have noticed twice in the last two weeks my mouse acting the same
> way. I assumed it was a hardware thing. When it happened I used the
> keyboard to shutdown my programs and then restarted the computer. I
> will check next time if it is just restarting X that fixes it.

Mmmh... this is interesting. Do you also use NVidia's driver?

I sent a msg to XFree86 ML at RedHat, and Mike Harris (one of the
XFree86 maintainers) sent me a very nice reply, with a couple of
suggestions. One of them was to temporarily switch to XFree86's own "nv"
driver instead of NVidia's, to try to narrow down the problem.

I am currently running X with "nv" driver, and will see how far it goes
without this annoying problem of "mouse auto-shutdown".

I don't boot into windoze much often (mainly for games), but I did it
yesterday and didn't experience any mouse problems. I still need more
data, but so far it does seem to be a Linux-only issue... =(

I will post back here any further info I gather.

Thks for helping,

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa