My computer mouse had been freezing and randomly stopped working for a few seconds. Happened all the time, whether I had lots of programs running or none. After some investigation, I found an approach that worked on my Windows Vista OS.

  1. Clean the registry - I used CCleaner to give my registry a scrub.
  2. Drivers - Uninstall all mouse drivers and restart the computer; for a standard mouse, Windows should install a fresh copy of the driver upon restart.*

* DO be careful! Before uninstalling the mouse driver; make sure you know how to safely restart the computer without a mouse, and be sure your mouse can run on a standard mouse drive for the reinstall--you can upgrade to different driver later. Upon restart, windows should reinstall the driver, but this approach isn't without risk. Use at your own discretion.

In my case, I had two copies of the mouse driver installed, so I uninstalled both to clean the slate and force Windows to install "fresh" copies of the mouse driver.

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