I left my usb hub on the floor with winxp running when my dog stepped on it and broke it. It didn't seem like a big deal, just plug the usb optical mouse and keyboard directly into the computer and buy a new hub.

When windows booted the mouse froze at the logon screen. I thought the mouse was damaged but the red light came on during the initial boot and went off at the logon screen.

I confirmed the mouse worked fine using a reatgo boot disk. Since it wasn't a hardware problem windows was obviously borked. So I'd restore a S/R backup that was 3 weeks old and had worked before.

Now the dumb drive letter issue came into play as my firewire hard drive wasn't seen by the rescue disk. I assumed this was due to winxp being borked so I formatted the drive with the reatgo disk.

The rescue disk still didn't see the hd. I reinstalled winxp as a new install. Interestingly the mouse worked fine with the bare bones install. Now the rescue disk saw the hd and I restored my backup.

After the reboot the mouse froze again at the logon screen. I did an xp repair install and the mouse worked fine in the restored winxp. After a reboot the mouse froze again at logon.

Now I  used a usb/ps2 converter and the mouse worked fine plugged into the ps2 port. I checked google and found the logitech mouse had its own driver called mouseware. I uninstalled this, plugged the mouse into the usb port, rebooted and now the mouse worked fine.

Obviously the broken hub corrupted the mouse driver though I don't know why that should have happened. My question is why would a restore from a good backup leave the mouse driver corrupted?

Thanks for the post, Larry. I broke up your single block of text into smaller, bite-sized chunks to make it easier to read.

Rad