Wandering Mouse Cursor
 

I've got the latest Intellimouse driver installed but on two different laptops the mouse cursor goes for an intermittent wander along the top of the screen (and occasionally to the bottom of the screen). It started happening about a month ago so I cannot (or haven't been yet able to) relate the fault to any Microsoft patch. I expect to find that it's related to a program that cuts in every so many clock cycles (may be Outlook checking the mailbox at the ISP, but System File check has achieved nought).

Anybody out there having the same problem (or any clues as to cause)? Both laptops have vaguely similar software on them. Op sys is XP Pro with SP2 and most MS updates.

If it is an optical mouse check the pad.

I had a similar occurence and it was the variation of the pattern/colours of the pad that the optics could not cope with.
A change to a plain background cured it.

Nope, it's not the pad contrast Henry.

Even running it over a newspaper makes no difference. If the mouse suddenly gets it into its head to take off for a top or bottom screen border, that's it.

Not caused by spyware cutting in either (using S&D Spybot plus Adaware SE). Registry First Aid, System Mechanic 6, Registryfix and Registry Mechanic and PCMedik in use. Nothing makes any difference.

TS

I sometimes get this, but it is normally because of the touchpad on the laptop and the static from me that causes it. If you can turn the pad off try that.

I did have this with a nipple mouse / joystick - if I kemt my finger on it, the mouse thought that was the neutral position and it drifted away.

Solved that by going to the touchpad !

humidity
 

yes have you tried disabling the touchpad completely? The pointer on my fujitsu-siemens will go absolutely crazy if i am in a fairly humid environment. If I am sitting on an airport shuttle bus without aircon for example, the pointer just flies to the top or side and will not respond properly. With the touchpad disabled in services.msc however, a usb mouse on my knee works fine

On our works Dell laptops we used to get that problem.

The engineers explained to me that the ribbon cable going to the "nipple" mouse in the center of the keyboard wasn't sufficiently electrically shielded, so it could pick up interferance which moved the pointer.

The long term fix was to upgrade the ribbon cable - Dell had started using better shielded cables. But the short term fix was simply to go into Control Panel and disable the "nipple" mouse.

RC

Disabling the Touchpad Mouse
 

Toshiba laptop

Still trying to figure out how (scrub one of the two drivers and it just re-installs itself on reboot).

Appears to be no provision in Control Panel (under mouse) to deactivate the touchpad.