Cursor control out of control

Question

I have several c400 dells and for the most part they work fine. I have one that has always had a cursor positioning problem.  When on the internet, as I enter data on one line and then tab to the next line, the cursor can (1) disappear or (2) jump to the prior line somewhere within the data already entered and it then starts to insert what I am typing.  I have just purchased another c400 with a small hard drive and bought and installed a larger drive. Not thinking, I used the c400 with this cursor postioning problem to format the new drive and now it also has the same problem.  If this was a mainframe using cics, I could fix it, but I am not sure where the problem lies within the this and the other PC.  One of the ways I have been forced to slow down this error is to type alot slower, fast typing seems to increase the error occurrance.  Anybody have any ideas.

Delierious · Answer

Does this only happen when actually in IE 6/7 or Firefox or whatever browser? Or do you mean, "When I am connected to the net, even if I do not have a internet window open, my cursor misbehaves in all open programs."?

If it's the former, I would suggest the repair function for IE or a uninstall/reinstall for Firefox.

If it is the latter or if the former does not work, you might wish to go to Control Panel | System | Hardware | Device Manager | Mice | click the plus sign | right click remove | Say Yes to everything and restart computer. | Windows will find your mouse and re-install it.

This often overcomes minor problems.

hdunker · Answer

Hello:  Thanks for the response.  Tried the uninstall/reinstall of mouse with no success.  I bought a c400 with a 20gig drive which had no cursor problem and bought a 80gig drive for it.  I used my one c400 that has the cursor jump problem to copy its harddrive to the new 80gig.  The cursor problem migrated with the new 80gig.  I have two other c400's that do not have the problem along with a 8500 dell that is also clean.  I googled on (cursor virus) and have found alot of people that have the same major cursor jump problem on their PC's which some had at the time they bought it and others that had the problem start at a later date.  Since this problem migrated from a PC with the problem to a PC that was operating cleanly, I suspect that this is a virus but I have no idea on how to find it and fix it.  In searching Microsoft, they don't seem to want to address the problem.  Anybody have any suggestions on how to proceed?

Delierious · Answer

As I now understand it
(i) you had computer A with a 20Gb drive and no problem.
(ii) You had computer B with a problem and copied the contents of B's HD to a 80Gb HD
(iii) you inserted the 80Gb disk into computer A
(iv) Computer A started having the same problems as computer B

As I asked in the earlier post
(i) does the cursor jumping occur only when you are in IE (or other browser) or
(ii) does it happen all the time if you are connected to the internet?
(iii) what browser are you using? IE (which version), Firefox?
If you are using IE, download Firefox, do not open IE, and see if it happens in Firefox.

Go to Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Event Viewer | System are there any alarm signs? If so double click them for an explanation - this might help. If there are any, post the exact text in the forum or search for it yourself on Google.

In Device manager remove the touchpad and reboot. (i.e. as per the mouse)

Any change?

If this has no effect, I suggest you download and run HijackThis and post in the HijackThis forum (see the list on the side.) Personally, I've never heard of a virus that has this effect, and would suspect a conflict between a program and the touchpad driver - but then, that does not mean that such a virus does not exist.

Are all the drivers up-to-date?

Being as this has happened on 2 computers, the bells that were faintly ringing in my mind about a lose contact beneath the touchpad are not relevant, although such problems are well-known.

After this, it appears that a reformat and reinstall of XP is required. Back up your personally entered data and test after you have loaded SP2.

Message Edited by Delierious on 01-13-2008 01:31 PM

hdunker · Answer

Silver:   Thanks for the helpful suggestion. This is what I finally ended up doing and it seems to have worked.  I took the hard drive out of infected PC #2 and reformed it with the original infected PC #1.  I let #1 reformat the hard drive 5 times and then I used an over write program to over write the formated hard drive 2 times.  I then use PC #3, which has no cursor problem and formated the hard drive 5 more times.  I then used a copy program from APRICORN to copy the data from the #3 good PC to the hard drive it had just formated.  For an 80 gig drive this took about 10 hours.  With the hard drive back in the #2 PC, it now appears to be working just fine.  So far that is.  If the problem appears again, I'll post it but it seems that the problem has been removed.  Again, thanks for the help.

Windows General

Cursor control out of control

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