Mouse freezes (most times) during cold boot

This has been going on for months, and seems to be getting worse.

At the same point during a cold boot (IPL every morning) and when coming out of a sleep, the mouse will usually freeze, requiring multiple reboots or sleep/awake cycles. It usually takes 1 or 2 reboots/sleeps, but has been as high as 7 reboots. Sometimes it comes up normally.

First the specs, then the observations.
PC is a Gigabyte board, Pent4 2.8Ghz, 1gb RAM
Mouse is a Logitech wireless MX700, KB is a Logitech wireless, RF interface is PS2. Driver is current.
Windows XP Home Sp2

I'm asking in this forum because I feel it is s/w not h/w related.
I have raised this issue with Logitech but they seem totally baffled (by asking me to do ridiculous things) and now simply want to replace the mouse.

When I cold boot each morning, the mouse cursor comes up and I can wave the mouse around for 8 seconds (timed) then it usually freezes and stays frozen. Sometimes it will hesitate at that point, then it's OK. 4 seconds later Itouch comes up. On rare occasions the KB is frozen as well, or independently. I have to hard reset, sometimes several times to get them running. If I pass the 8 second point with the mouse still in motion, it is OK all day except sometimes when I sleep the PC.

About half the time when I sleep the PC or it times out into sleep, on awake (with a mouse motion) the mouse is either totally dead, or I lose all its extra functions (wheel and extra buttons). Reconnecting the base or mouse reset buttons has no effect. I have to sleep the PC, wait a few seconds then wake it via a keyboard click. This usually works within 1 or 2 cycles. Yet sometimes the KB is dead on awake, and then I have to sleep/awake a few times to get it up. A very few times I had to reboot.

I have yanked and reset all connectors, replaced batteries, reinstalled Logitech completely, but it still goes on.

Using Process Explorer the freeze seems to occur around the startup of the last of 6 svchost.exe and the start of explorer.exe. This is 8 seconds after smss.exe and 4 seconds before Itouch.exe.

The only other thing that starts up in that time window is AVAST, but somehow AVAST moved its startup position to that point from an earlier start point just after I did a startup list cleanup this last weekend. Last week svchost was immediately followed by explorer then Itunes, so I do not believe AVAST has anything to do with it. But I will disable AVAST startup for the next few days to be sure.

Any ideas???

 

No. This mouse has button functions I can't live without so I never tried. The only spare mouse I have is an old serial port mouse, which I will attempt to find and try if this mouse locks up but good.