Mouse freezing in Windows 2000...

Hi. This is my first post. I found an old forum thread on this site (which is now closed) while searching for a solution to this mouse freezing problem I'm having.

The mouse will suddenly stop moving. Sometimes it starts moving again and other times it never unfreezes and I have to use the keyboard controls to restart my computer. Often, when it decides to unfreeze, I lose my mouse acceleration until the next time it freezes and unfreezes, at which point I get my acceleration back. Some days, the problem is not too bad. Other days, like today, it's so bad that I simply have to use the keyboard to do everything.

It didn't always do this. The computer is about two years old and I did not have this problem for the first year or so. Once it started, however, it's just gotten gradually worse and worse. Here's what I've tried so far to fix it:

- Restarting the computer. Sometimes it makes the problem go away for a day or so. Other times, the mouse is completely frozen at startup and stays that way.

- Reinstalling the mouse driver. Same result.

- Updating and running Spy Bot and AdAware. They found nothing.

- Turning off the hard drive indexing service. I read somewhere that this might be causing the problem. No dice for me.

- Updating my video drivers. Again, no luck.

- Setting my video performance setting to one tick left of "Full" to apparently fix problems with the mouse. No go.

- Updating my motherboard drivers. Didn't fix it.

I have yet to try using a different mouse, which will be my next step. The device manager lists three device issues (yellow question marks with red X's over them): Ethernet Controller and two RAID Controller entries. However, these have been there since I bought the computer, long before this freezing problem started happening.

I have an Athlon 64 3200+ Processor with 2 gigs of RAM, GeForce 6800 Ultra, and SoundBlaster Live Audigy. If anyone can help me out with fixing this problem, I will be more thankful than you can shake a stick at.

 

Hi Krokus, welcome to the board! Since this is a computer running Windows 2000, I'm moving this thread to that forum.

As for the mouse problem, I had this problem for a while this summer. I could usually get it to work again by moving the wire around a bit right where it goes into the mouse. It finally got to the point where that wouldn't work so I bought a new one and haven't had any trouble since. So, I think you're correct to try a different mouse first. Let us know what you find. If that doesn't do it, hopefully we can come up with an answer for you.

 

Sorry about posting in the wrong area. I thought NT covered Windows 2000 as well.

I'll try to snag another mouse from somewhere and see if it helps. In the mean time, I've just run a registry cleaner (it found 608 problems). If the freezing goes away, then I've finally found the cause and there will be much rejoicing.

I should point out for posterity that another thing I tried, after reinstalling the mouse driver didn't work, was to reinstall Windows 2000. That made things rather worse, it seems.

First, I found I could no longer run some software on my computer. Kept getting a missing DLL error. A fair bit of internet research turned up the fact that Windows 2000 had stupidly decided to install XP versions of some drivers. I managed to track down the missing driver (from the safest site I could find) and that fixed the problem.

It also caused another problem. Suddenly my computer was constantly making irritating clicking and popping noises from the speaker all the time. It got worse any time anything was drawn on the screen. Some experimentation revealed that the volume of the clicks and pops didn't change when I lowered the volume using the volume control program, which led me to think that the problem was with the audio driver. Sure enough, I updated the audio driver and it went away.

Sure will be nice to be able to eventually use my computer instead of having to fix it all the time.

 

It appears that cleaning my registry has eliminated the problem. I haven't had a single mouse freeze since.

On the "Yay!" side, I can finally use my computer again.

On the "Boo!" side, I was kind of looking forward to smashing my old mouse with a sledgehammer.

While I didn't find my solution in this thread, I did find it in an older thread here. Heaps of thanks to this site for finally helping to solve this problem that's been plaguing me for ages. Yay!

Update: My mouse briefly froze a couple of times just now and I lost my mouse acceleration again. Argh! Maybe I'll get to hit my mouse with a sledgehammer after all...

 

Well, I'll wait until you try another mouse although I'm not so sure that'll be your answer either. When I had this trouble I don't remember losing the acceleration. Once I wiggled the wire and got control of the cursor again, everythigng was normal. Still, it's the most logical place to start. IMHO, it's best to eliminate the possibility of hardware failure first in a case such as this.

 

Sorry for taking so long to reply. I finally picked up a new mouse and the freezing problem has indeed gone away, although every once in a while the mouse suddenly blinks wildly around the screen for no reason and ends up in the corner. Haven't been able to solve that issue yet but it's minor compared to the freezing problem.

Now I get to smash my old mouse with a sledgehammer! Yay!

Thanks muchly for your help.