Mouse freezing/lockups

I'm running a Dell PIII 933 with 384MB ram, a 32 MB Radeon Card, SB live, and a printer. For almost a year and a half, it's been solid as a rock, but suddenly it's been having a really annoying problem.

I boot it up cold, and it works ok, for a while, and then one of two things happen:

What it usually does is the mouse freezes, and the PC shows no other problems. If I'm running a game or something that can continue without any input from me, it usually goes on fine until the game is over, I let it go once, and it ran for almost 24 hours without locking up. I restart or shut down and reboot, and it repeatedly gets the same thing, almost every time.

Once in a while, the mouse gets "sticky" where it sticks on the screen but doesn't totally or permanently freeze like the usual problem. If I let it go on, it eventually locks up the PC, and it has to have the reset button pushed.


I have reinstalled the mouse many times, ran several virus scans (one time it found some virus, and the problem seemed to be gone for about 10 days) without finding anything, and have tried another mouse, and nothing changes. There is never any error message, and it has no pattern I can see as far as when it occurs, it's always a while, 15+ minutes, after a reboot until it occurs.

Anyone got any ideas?? Thanks

"(one time it found some virus, and the problem seemed to be gone for about 10 days) "
When you say several virus scans you did them with the same AV program?
You can doublecheck here
http://security2.norton.com/ssc/home.asp?
and scan with Ad-aware if you didn't
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Sometimes getting rid of junk helps.
If these don't help try remove some items from your startup programs.

I ran both NAV and Mcafee, and some other virus scan I found on a tech support page, and other than stopping a bunch of infected with Klez messages, NAV caught the JS.Startpage virus, and all that's supposed to affect is IE and the home page. I removed everything I don't ever run, and run a minimal amount of stuff in startup. The thing I don't get is what triggers it, sometimes it takes a long time, but other times it's about 20 minutes after a reboot. It is unafected by how long the PC has been on, rebooting always fixes it for a while. Ive had a USB and two PS2 mice on it, and it does the same thing, so it probably isn't hardware. Nothin unusual seems to be loaded up when it freezes. It used to almost never crash, and only had to have a frozen task ended, and even that didn't happen very often. Anyway, thanks for the reply..

You might try adjusting your hardware accelerator. Go to Control Panel>Display>Settings>Advanced and navigate to the Hardware Accelerator Slide Bar. Move it back 1/4 to 1/2 from full acceleration, click Apply and OK. Also, if you haven't already done so, tweak the programs running in the background via Start>Run >msconfig and uncheck any program that does not need to run at startup. Post back and let us know if this helps.

I'll try it, but since it ran flawlessly for almost 18 months before this problem started, I don't think it will affect it all that much. I have everything I can turned off in the startup items. Thanks anyway, I'll let you know if anything happens.

Just a thought, but since this is a recent problem, why not use System Restore to roll it back to a known good point?

I tried that, sadly, the last time it saved it was before it fixed itself temporarily, and so it kept doing it. I ran 2 full Vscans, and a couple of web based virus scanners, and they found nothing, BUT it's much better. I played Red Alert 2 last night for almost 3 hours straight, and I thought "Hey, it's fixed!" Nahhhh, it was just messing with my head. I was browsing after I finished, and it froze, and then after I restated it, it froze about 20 minutes into browsing, and about 30 seconds after the mouse froze, it locked up. Right now, it's been downloading stuff for 2+ hours, and hasn't locked up yet. If I didn't know better, I would say it's hardware, but I made an old fashoined DOS bootdisk, and put DOS on the HD, and it ran game after game without a problem, once I got the game to load at all. I don't know what's going on..

Thanks for the reply.