It seems like this week is not my week. I ran into all sorts of strange problems that I have not seen before. One problem on my Core i7 machine is that the mouse doesn’t work properly. Whenever I plug in a new mouse, it appears to be working initially without driver. Then the hardware wizard kicks in, the mouse stops working after the wizard finishes. This happens to a lot of different generic mice from Dell. Checked the system log and didn’t find any warnings or errors.
My next stop is the hardware manager. I found that even though I had several mice connected, there is none listed under the Mice and other pointing devices. Those mice were all recognized as Human Interface Devices. Apparently, all the mice were installed as HID-compliant devices after the add new hardware wizard. I found a workaround is to uninstall these devices and plug them to the computer again. When the hardware wizard runs, follow these steps.
- Select Install from a list or specify a location (Advanced) and click on Next.
- Select Don’t search. I will choose a driver to install. and click on Next.
- Select HID-compliant mouse and click on Next to finish the installation.
Note that in the screenshot of step 3, the wizard says the HID-compliant mouse driver is not digitally signed. I think this is the problem why the automatic installation fails. What puzzles me is that the driver is the original driver from Microsoft and it’s digitally signed. I even ran sigverif.exe to verify the driver and it’s good. Anyway, before I found the true cause of the problem, this workaround saves me a lot of troubles.
