My word! What a response! Many thanks gentlemen (and ladies, if any). On reflection, methinks Avtrician may well be on target. It's a 2.1 Gb H/D, 48 Mbs RAM and a P 166. I was, perhaps, lulled into the belief that Linux was a low end hardware spec OS. This as against, for instance, Win 3.1 which I ran on a 386 with 8 Mbs RAM (believe it!!) and an 80 MEGabyte H/D.
The mouse problem seems odd since it works perfectly with W 98, W 3.1, Dos 5 and 6 and OS2 Warp, on the same machine. The graphics card I would have thought was pretty mainstream being a Creative Blaster Eclipse - which is listed in the Red Hat setup but not in the SUSE.
Anyway, I have decided to try a change of direction back to an old favourite OS - OS2 Warp. Anything to get away from Windoze for a while.
I have a second H/D on the machine (SCSI 4.5 GBs) so I may try a triple/quadruple boot system with Linux, OS2, Dos and, maybe BEOS. That should keep me out of mischief for a while.
Meantime, while trying to convert CDA files to WAVs via NERO Media Player, I got the following informative text in W 98. "The WinASPI file'?.?' can't be found, therefore you can currently select only image recorders. The missing file is part of the Windows 95'98/ME files. Please fix this problem and restart." "Error 15 (mismatched components)" A similar message appears if I try to open Nero Burning. Device Manager shows the CD as working correctly and there are no associated exclamation or question marks. Given that the error message is of the usual helpful Windows variety, does anyone have any idea what this is all about, please? (I have, of course, re-installed both W 98 and Nero Burning with no improvement.)