MS Intellimice optical 'shutting down' anyone?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Mar 10, 2004, Andre Costa <acosta at ar.microlink.com.br> wrote:

> I've been experiencing lately some weird mouse behavior: all of a
> sudden, mouse simply goes off, and even though X11 remains responsive
> (keyboard works), it usually leaves me no option besides killing X11
> with CTRL+ALT+BKSP -- which often makes me lose some work. Restarting X
> brings mouse back up again, as if nothing had happened.

Arjan gave me this tip the other day, when I ran into a similar
problem: Alt-F2, start xterm, run metacity --replace, and mouse
buttons work again.  Not sure whether your problem is just with
buttons, or with being able to use the mouse to move the pointer,
select other apps, etc, but I thought I'd share the tip anyway.
It has saved me some work a number of times recently.  I suspect I do
have some mouse hardware issue, that causes a very large number of
events to be triggered at about the same time, getting metacity very
confused.  Of course it shouldn't lose touch with reality just because
of such an interactivity storm, but it looks like it does :-(

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}