RH 8.0 doesn't like USB mouse on laptop

[cmorgan spamblocked com]

For my second install of RH 8.0, I chose a Sony PCG-R505TEK laptop.
Not a whole lot works following this install, so I'm sorting through
the various nonresponsive hardware entities.

First up is a cheap USB wheel mouse (made by DEXXA).  It worked poorly with
the original kernel that came with the RH 8.0 CD set.  When I upgraded to
the latest kernel via Red Hat Network, I see this in /var/log/messages when
I plug the mouse into a USB port.

kernel: hub.c: USB new device connect on bus1/1, assigned device number 4
kernel: usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
kernel: usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=4 (error=-110)
kernel: hub.c: USB new device connect on bus1/1, assigned device number 5
kernel: usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
kernel: usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=5 (error=-110)

This mouse works just fine with Win2K.  Do I need to cut over to a
more recent 2.4.X kernel?

Current kernel is: 2.4.18-19.8.0 .

Thanks in advance.

- Clark