I've got a bit of a strange one here, and after a bit of searching around I couldn't find any solutions that worked. Naturally, I'm turning to the collective wisdom that is bit-tech to see what you all can make of this. The few Google searches I've done have pointed to laptops with trackpad issues, and people turning off mouse sensitivity in the control panel. Neither of those solutions affect me since 1) I'm not on a laptop; and 2) this problem just appeared out of nowhere. Last night my mouse cursor started acting erratically for no apparent reason. I was browsing normally, then suddenly the cursor started changing (going from 'arrow' to 'crosshairs' to other cursors, in no apparent order). Now, the cursor is jumping to the bottom-left of the screen and activating the start menu. No matter what I do, if I try to move the mouse, after a couple of seconds it snaps back to the bottom left and activates the start menu. If I leave it alone, the start menu sometimes closes, then opens again. If I work fast enough, I can open the control panel, but as soon as I try to open any program, the control panel freezes and I can't do anything else with it - I can't open any more programs, nor can I close the control panel window. I unplugged the mouse, but the problem persists. I press the 'Windows' button on my keyboard and use the arrow keys to navigate through the different menu options, but then the start menu closes by itself after a couple seconds. I also unplugged the keyboard just to see what would happen, but the cursor does the same thing. When I boot into safe mode, the problem goes away. In safe mode, I downloaded the current mouse drivers, uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, and I ran a full system scan with Avast. Avast did not find anything. I set it to run a boot scan then restarted the computer, booting into Windows normally. Again, Avast found nothing, but the problem continued - the cursor kept snapping to the bottom-left and activating the start menu. I wasn't browsing any dodgy sites, so I'm fairly confident that I haven't picked up anything nasty (the next step may be to run a scan with a couple of other utilities). If it helps, I'm using a Razer Lachesis mouse running the current drivers (I downloaded the current drivers while I was in safe mode). My operating system is Windows XP Pro SP3 (yeah yeah, I know). So, ye tech gurus of bit-tech, what do you make of this? I'm at work now, and I'm looking forward to getting home so that I can starting ripping things apart if need be.
Well, I figured it out, and I admit I'm a bit embarrassed by the solution. Coincidentally, we switched our cable TV service yesterday, and with our new TV/internet provider comes a new router/modem. The new modem is larger than my old Cisco wireless router (due to the fact that the new modem is a complete residential gateway for internet, TV, and phone), and during the install I just shoved it into the back portion of my desk until I determine a more permanent location. The temporary location just happens to be where I keep my graphics tablet. As soon as I sat down at my desk this evening and looked at the setup I realized what was going on. Apparently something in the gateway has enough capacitance to trigger the graphics tablet's location sensors, as well as trigger the button functions normally triggered by the pen. As soon as I moved the residential gateway the problem went away. I tested this by moving the gateway back over the tablet and sure enough, instant bottom-left corner with start menu activation. Problem solved, and the solution was one of those "Duh!" moments.
