Good evening, I have been working on an ebay buy Compaq aero and have hit a dead end (I think). The track ball mouse worked, the cursor moved around the screen, but whenever I used the "enter" command while hovering over what I wanted to open, I received a "exit windows now prompt"? I am thinking about just switching the Aero to a "Dos only" laptop with a GUI, but I wanted to be certain that it will not work in wfw 3.11 before I did that. Thanks in advance

Is it a Compaq Contura Aero? I' ve got such a machine running MS DOS 7.0 and Windows 3.1, and have never encountered this problem. Try connecting an external (serial) mouse to the device, and see if problem persists. If it does, then it should be a software issue, not a hardware one. My trackball works quite well, but I almost always prefer to have an external mouse connected to the Aero. However, I should state that serial mouses tend to be a little rare, these days...

The mouse has been fixed, the problem was a bad install of WFW 3.11, it would just freeze on startup. A format and a switch back to 3.1/6.22 and it worked fine.