irritating problem...

[Birju Prajapati <birju nextmodels com>]

hi all,
i'm pretty new here, and have a problem which is probably quite easy to 
solve, but dont know how!
about once a week, when i left click with the mouse while pressing 
shift, the mouse completely hangs. I end up having to ctrl-alt-bsp and 
restarting X to get it working again. it's a microsoft usb optical mouse 
on a dell 4550. i'm running fedora core2 with the kernel upgraded to 
2.6.8-1. i haven't upgraded gnome or anything.
i dont really want to restart X everytime it happens, but i wouldnt mind 
restarting the mouse server (or whatever software it is that does the 
i/o for the mouse). so here's my question: how do i just 'restart' the 
mouse?? btw i do have full keyboard access and can navigate to a bash 
console with it whenever it happens.

any help much appreciated!
thanks,
birju