Mouse Difficulty

[Adept]

I've got a new problem, one that the tech support line called 'interesting'. I patched my video card drivers, and when I ran the game, the mouse pointer was frozen in the middle of the screen. I could move the mouse around (things would highlight and I could select items just like normal), but the visible pointer would stay in the middle. I managed to quit to desktop, and the problem remained - the visible pointer was frozen in the middle of the screen. I've called tech support twice, and each time the mouse pointer remains mobile a little longer, but I still have the difficulty. I have an optical logitech mouse without mouseware installed.

System Specs:
AMD XP 1800
512 MB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP 8x (128 MB memory)
ASUS A7N8X-X MB with onboard audio
Windows 2000, fully patched.
All components patched from NVIDIA with best option.

When I reboot, the mouse point is completely mobile, but when I load a saved game, the pointer gets stuck. I've also had this problem happen once when I opened excel, but I've been unable to duplicate that. Anyone got an idea?

 

[Neon Deon]

Since it would appear that almost everything but the motherboard & mouse is old as the hills, I would go with a new mouse driver. Some of its drivers are from 2001. Win 2000 might not have a good default driver for such a new mouse.

However,

Your resources on your computer are old, limited, overtaxed, and are in some cases lower then minimum requirements for the game.

It might be best while attempting to play the game that you play the game and only the game. Anotherwords, turn off all NON MS startup programs that are taking up resources.

I would also consider raising the page file to 1500 too.

 

[Zydor]

Also try turning off mouse trails in the mouse driver, there have been a number of reports of users having mouse problems, discovered mouse trails was on (turned low so in fact not actually seen, but nonetheless still on). Physicaly check the setting, and if on, even at lowest setting, turn that off.

Regards
Zy

 

[techie007]

I've got a new problem, one that the tech support line called 'interesting'. I patched my video card drivers, and when I ran the game, the mouse pointer was frozen in the middle of the screen. I could move the mouse around (things would highlight and I could select items just like normal), but the visible pointer would stay in the middle. I managed to quit to desktop, and the problem remained - the visible pointer was frozen in the middle of the screen. I've called tech support twice, and each time the mouse pointer remains mobile a little longer, but I still have the difficulty. I have an optical logitech mouse without mouseware installed.

I'm having this exact problem. And when i get back to the Windows desktop the pointer is still missing. The strange thing is it worked fine for many days of use and then did it once to me. I rebooted and played for the rest of the day no problem.

This time I played for about 5 minutes and it did it. And now I can't get a game to load for any length of time without it dying.

This was all on 1.09. I updated to 1.54(?) today and the problem still exists.

If I start a new game it works fine all thru picking the world options and which Civ I want to play, etc.

It seems to die at about the same itme I get my first console message in Civ 4 (ie: Autosaving).

I also have a Logitech optical mouse (MX1000). And an nVidia video card (Asus brand, FX5200 chipset).

I have no mouse trails turned on, and I AM using logitech's drivers.

P4-3E, 512MB RAM, blah blah. Like I said, it worked fine for several days of playing in the past, and I've made no system changes directly (who knows what MS Update did ).

 

[Neon Deon]

post a dxdiag file please.

 

[techie007]

post a dxdiag file please.

I'll post one when I get home to the computer in question.

Here's an update since the last post:

I completely removed Civ 4.

I installed the latest nVidia drivers (I was runnig the version prior to the newest).

I reinstalled DirectX (using the "December Build").

I reinstalled CIV 4.

Interestingly this weird mouse problem happened during the install this time!

After I got it finished up, updated to 1.52 and rebooted, etc. the game ran fine for over an hour and then suddenly the mouse cursor detached again.

Liek before, the mouse cursor is still visible on the screen, but it's not moving, yet there is an active (altho invisible) pointer that still works.

Now I'm back to not being able to get a game loaded or started without the mouse problem surfacing once the actual game begins.

This hasn't happened in any other situation -- only when dealing with CIV4.

 

[techie007]

The quest continues..

Ok there's comething NOT Civ4 (directly) related that is causing this problems.

I had been using an Asus nVidia FX5200 AGP card. And it was fine except it only had a DVI-D port on it and not a DVI-I so I couldn't hook up my 2nd CRT to it.

I broke down and bought a new Asus nVidia 6600 card so i could use my other monitor (and an extra gig of RAM).

So with this new card I havn't gotten around to trying Civ4 yet. I was playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, and played it all night without any trouble.

Today I go to play it and low and behole the invisible mouse problem surfaces in RCT, and like with Civ, it stays invisible after exiting back to the desktop.

The new interesting twitch is that the mouse cursor still works as expected on the 2nd monitor!

So if I'm in the game or on the desktop and the mouse is moved over to the other monitor it is visible. Move it back to the primary display and it's invisible but still working.

I'm now highly suspecting the last two releases of the Nvidia driver, and not any one game, or DirectX.

I ran DXDiag to post it here and it complained that the system.dll file was missing (on the 'DirectX Files' tab) which it's not. I did a quick google and found out there is a key that got left in the registry from a previous DX build. Removed the key and now it knows all the files are good.

So I'll post my DXDiag now and we'll see if anyone has ANY ideas.

 

[techie007]

OK so apparently it's a known nVidia driver problem. It just hasn't been admitted to by nVidia or something. People seem to be having good luck using the 7x.xx version of the drivers. So I uninstalled the newest ones and threw the last version of the 7x.xx series for XP in (v78.01).

We'll see what happens over the next few days.

 

[techie007]

After many days of using the 78.01 drivers for my nVidia 6600GT card it works wonderfully. The game runs faster, and my mouse stays working.. Stupid Forceware...

If you're having the disappearing mouse problem, then roll back to an earlier driver set.