Hi, all, I connected a stereo cable from my cassette deck to the "Line In" jack on my PC. I have a microphone plugged into the "Microphone Input" jack. When I rebooted, my mouse was frozen in the centre of the screen, but the keyboard was working okay. I wiggled all the cables at the rear of the PC and pushed them in tight. As nothing seemed to help, I removed the plugs from the "Line In" and "Microphone" jacks and re-inserted them. I then pressed the "Reset" button. Everything is now okay... But, why did this happen? I searched the My Computing.Net database and found plenty on "Mouse Lockup' questions, but nothing to help me.

You may have had a hardware conflict, perhaps the same windows system resources in terms of IRQ's. An IRQ is an interrupt request signal. All hardware drivers are assingned an IRQ or system resource. It may be that when you plugged in your microphone, windows detected it, but got a little confused on assigning system resources to it. After jiggling things around like you said, it may have caused windows to "re-evalutate and re-allocate" resources so that the conflict was resolved. My experience has been, mouse problems are persistent problems. So I wouldn't count on this condition remaining stable. Any new or changed hardware may upset this delicate balance. In the end, you may have to assign manually a different IRQ, using a different HEX address. You can do this thru the System Information (SIC)Consol. Start, Accessories, System Tools, System Information. Once there, click on Hardware Resources. Go down to IRQ's and click on it. You can now view the system resources and which components are assigned which IRQ's. You can also go down to Components and click on Input and see the keyboard and mouse and the registry settings for those components. If the mouse again hangs up, you may consider going to a different mouse type. If you have the regular mouse adapter type, you may consider going to USB. I have been able to resolve seeming mouse conflicts by doing this (which would not resolve any other way). Good luck.

Hi, jimc5 I believe your theory regarding the assigning of system resources is the correct answer to my problem as my microphone had been plugged into the "Line In" jack. It was only after I plugged it into the correct jack and then inserted the cassette player plug that I had problems. Many thanks.