Mouse not working

Been asked by a friend to look at her PC because her mouse no longer appears to be working. Her PC running Win98 has no PS2 port so that the mouse has te be serial. The problem started when she plugged in a serial modem to the second com port after which neither worked.
I have tried a number of different mice which all work on my PC but the system doesn't recognise any of them. On booting, the message, No PS2 mouse found, you may now connect Serial mouse and when I do it still doesn't work. I have re-installed Win 98 but this makes no difference.
Is this a MB problem and/or can I make the keyboard emulate a mouse in any way.

Yours in frustration

 

On your friend's PC Control Panel/System/Device Manager
do you see any invalid items marked with an exclamation mark ?
If so, which ?
regards

 

PS I assumed above that you would use the keyboard to look in control panel
- start with CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE keys to get the Start Menu and then TAB/UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT and ENTER keys to navigate around ...
regards

 

You can get to the Device Manager by holding down the flying window key, if you have one, and press the Pause/Break key.
Right when you select the Device Manager tab using the arrow keys, hold down SHIFT and press the TAB key 7 times. The arrow keys will be now highlighting hardware items. Remove any items with a yellow ! or ? on it, press DEL to do so.
When windows reboots, it should redetect what was removed and reinstall properly.

 

Mouse problem

I was just to come back and say. yes, I have removed the modem and I had no way of accessing device manager but it seems that some of you are thinking ahead of me,
I will try your suggestions and let you know how I fare.
Thanks for your help.

 

Mouse problem

Well, this is a strange saga. I went through Device Manager and deleted the yellow bits and rebooted. Had to re-install mouse through add hardware, so far so good. checked the details of Comm ports 1 & 2 and they both say that they are working with no problems. rebooted again and still no mouse activity. After 5 hours of pruning, changing, reinstalling and rebooting and in a fit of lateral thinking fed by desparation, I plugged in a USB mouse which I bought for myself yesterday and lo and behold IT WORKS.
I then installed the exterior modem, plugged it in to Comm 1 without much hope of ut working and rebooted and Voila!the Modem works also.
Either I have a number of mice which work on my PC but not hers or there is some sort of Comm port problem which doesn't affect the modem.
Problem solved in a roundabout way but I would dearly love to know what was causing the problem.
Thanks again all for your help (particularly grateful for the KB shortcuts to emulate mouse).

 

bg9208, thanks for posting back and we wish your friend "happy computing "
Furry mice are always a problem - and PC mice sometimes too.
regards