{"id":3116,"date":"2013-12-02T11:26:18","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T16:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ramblindan.org\/?p=3116"},"modified":"2013-12-02T11:33:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T16:33:43","slug":"a-mouse-tail-lesson-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/?p=3116","title":{"rendered":"A Mouse Tail (Lesson Learned)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A funny thing happened on the way to starting my computer. That paraphrase is so old<\/a> (1960\u2019s) most people don\u2019t know it is one.<\/p>\n

Actually what happened to me wasn\u2019t so funny until the end. Then I laughed at myself.<\/p>\n

I started my computer the day after I brought all my bookkeeping up to date on my computer. This was December 1st. The computer had been working flawlessly all of the previous day while I was bringing four months of sales and purchases up to date in QuickBooks and reconciling all bank statements.<\/p>\n

The first few minutes of the boot everything looked and worked normal then suddenly the on screen mouse pointer moved into the upper left quadrant of the screen and froze in place. I could sort of wiggle it with the mouse but it wouldn\u2019t move. The mouse buttons and wheel worked OK but that was it.<\/p>\n

First thought it was mechanical but after restarting the computer the mouse worked OK during initial boot but would then lock into the same position once windows finished fully booting. So I had about two minutes of normal mouse. WTF (Where\u2019s The Fire) I thought\u2026\u00a0 needed to defrost the mouse of course\u2026<\/p>\n

I began to suspect I had a virus or Trojan that was loading near the end of the boot. The date, December 1 could have been a programmed Holidays surprise gift.<\/p>\n

I could only navigate the screen with the keyboard and that was a test of endurance. Most programs have a way to make selections with the keyboard but they are well hidden and usually the moving highlight is barely noticeable. Some case the selection changes but there is NO highlight to indicate where I might be.<\/p>\n

That reinforced my thought it might be a Trojan. Kill the mouse and a majority of users will feel totally helpless. Actually I was feeling a bit helpless, but not totally.<\/p>\n

I rebooted into safe mode several times and all was well there. (I am running WIN6 Ultimate).<\/p>\n

In safe mode I transferred a popular spy ware program I had used long ago on other machines to the computer. I switched back to the full op systems and was able after several failed attempts to get it installed. However, it required a registration so I did some research on the old familiar program with my Linux computer and discovered the company had been sold to another company that was identified as not being very scrupulous. It also appeared the software wanted to \u201cown\u201d my virus protection.<\/p>\n

I immediately removed the install and suffered through a few pop-ups wanting to know why. Evidence enough for me to stay away.<\/p>\n

I then transferred another similar program I had used on my company laptop to successfully remove a Trojan that kept opening a web site I had never visited, usually at the same time every day. This time the loader said the file was out of date and had an option button to go to their website for an update. However, once there, there was no update available. Just a bunch more \u201clet me take over your computer\u201d uploads.<\/p>\n

Finally, I restarted the app and clicked \u201cstart anyway\u201d. The program started and worked the same way it had on my laptop. It found a small handful of \u201cbad\u201d files and I allowed it to remove them. This program did not install itself on either computer or at least I can find no evidence that it has. But I did move the exe. File to a place I would not run it again.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t identify these apps as your experience could be different.<\/p>\n

The next full reboot unfortunately revealed the frozen mouse pointer was still in deep freeze.<\/p>\n

I had removed several recent programs and screen displays (Bing Desktop) before running the search and destroy program. None of them held the problem.<\/p>\n

What all this did was make me realize perhaps it wasn\u2019t software virus issue. I really didn\u2019t want to do a total reinstall. What could it be? What else controls the mouse?<\/p>\n

Then the fog lifted. The last thing that worked well was the bookkeeping. When I finished that and shutdown the computer, I had a stack of paperwork about two inches thick, about the size and weight of a ream of printing paper. I had neatly stacked it and placed it on top of my BamBoo Wacom tablet.<\/i> In fact I couldn\u2019t even see that small size stylus pad. It has some control buttons on the top of it that respond to pressure (not the stylus). Son-Of-a-Bookkeeper, the problem has been in front of me all along. The driver for the Wacom must be one of the last things to load on a restart.<\/p>\n

I removed the stack of papers and my mouse immediately defrosted. It took about four hours of trouble shooting to discover the obvious new change STACKED on my computer desk. Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy.<\/p>\n

I would have moved the paper to storage after I first started the computer, but the mouse pointer threw me completely off track and onto a \u201cgot to fix this\u201d mind set. I abandoned all thought of the pile of paper and what I placed it upon.<\/p>\n

The computer does seem to be a little more responsive so perhaps the flushing did some good. So after I laughed at myself I decided I had a good \u201cLessons Learned\u201d to pass along. Nothing hurt and nothing but time lost, and just a bit smarter for the experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A funny thing happened on the way to starting my computer. That paraphrase is so old (1960\u2019s) most people don\u2019t know it is one. Actually what happened to me wasn\u2019t so funny until the end. Then I laughed at myself. I started my computer the day after I brought all my bookkeeping up to date on my computer. This was December 1st. The computer had been working flawlessly all of the previous day while I...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[28,96],"class_list":["post-3116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computersoftware","tag-computer","tag-sofware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}