X issue? No mouse cursor in between sessions (sometimes).

["Nuno Magalhães" <nunomagalhaes@eu.ipp.pt>]

Greetings,

I have a regular optical USB mouse conected to PS/2. Occasionaly i
come home to the gdm login screen, turn on the monitor and discover i
have no mouse cursor. I can login and do whatever i want, the mouse is
there and works, but i see no pointer.

I've tried issuing kill -HUP to both gdm (two instances?) and Xorg as
well as killing them both and restarting gdm. There's a process called
kpsmoused i can't seem to kill. So far the only "solution" i've found
is the rather unelegant reboot. I mostly use fluxbox but i don't think
that's relevant and i believe that it has happened with gnome as well.
There's no particular pattern i can follow to duplicate this, i log
in/out all the time. I last ran apt-get dist-upgrade a few days ago
but this particular issue still persists and, if i remember right, it
happens not only in between sessions but during a session as well.

Here's some useful info:
Debian unstable running on an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard.
.
shell: dmesg |grep mouse
[    0.917797] input: Macintosh mouse button emulation as /class/input/input0
[    0.928133] mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

shell: lspci |less
00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C51PV [GeForce
6150] (rev a2)

shell: Xorg -version
X.Org X Server 1.4.2
Release Date: 11 June 2008
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux Debian (xorg-server 2:1.4.2-9)
Current Operating System: Linux deb64 2.6.26-1-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Dec 15
17:25:36 UTC 2008 x86_64
Build Date: 15 November 2008  06:52:35PM
Module Loader present

Is the SMP for multiprocessor? 'Cos i only have one... I also don't
have Bluetooth but that shows up on my dmesg.

shell: cat xorg.conf
# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 1.0
Section "ServerLayout"
...
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
...
Section "Module"
    Load           "dbe"
    Load           "extmod"
    Load           "type1"
    Load           "freetype"
    Load           "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

TIA and happy new year for those of you following the Gregorian calendar,
Nuno Magalhães