Erratic Mouses and Other Microsoft Problems

Here's something that's amusing and frustrating at the same time:

My computer was having an erratic mouse problem. The pointer would slow down, would crawl, would leap all over the screen as if it had a mind of its own.

While trying to fix the problem, one of the things that I tried was to download a new mouse driver from microsoft.com. That didn't help any, so I un-installed the driver. That didn't help, either, but I was finally able to fix it the problem doing some other stuff.

I later stumbled on to some other entries on Microsoft's web site that dealt with erratic mouse behavior.

One said the symptom was "a slowing of the computer and erratic mouse behavior". So I dug further. The cause listed was "recently installed mouse driver downloaded from microsoft.com".

Their solution? Un-install the driver!

So on one page, they say that the problem can be fixed by downloading and installing this driver. On anther page, they say that the problem may have been caused because you followed their advice on the previous page to fix the problem that you started out with. And their solution is to un-do the solution that they previously told you about to fix the problem that their solution caused!

Sheesh... talk about circular logic!

If that story made you alternately shake your head in disbelief and nod your head in wise agreement, you're just geeky enough to be my kindred spirit.

And all you Mac people out there — I don't want to hear from you. You've got enough other problems.