Everything below the horizontal line is crazy-talk. Sorry.
It was a problem with the mouse itself. I believe the USB connection was damaged.
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I've been having issues recently with my mouse disconnecting and then reconnecting for no apparent reason when plugged directly into a USB port on my laptop.
I went into Control Panel -> Mouse, and found that my pointer was configured as shown:
Before: Synaptics TouchStyk V2.0 on PS/2 Port 0
I changed it to use the V7.0 Synaptic driver, and it appears to be working much better.
After: Synaptics TouchPad V7.2 on PS/2 Port 3
I also recajiggered the pointer so it's bigger and has a tail.
Not sure if this will help anyone, ever, but it's been really annoying me, so I thought I'd share just in case ;-)
