mouse stopped working

[Ross Boylan <RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org>]

I have a mostly testing system, and my mouse just stopped working in
the middle of a session.  The cursor became unresponsive, and then it
disappeared completely.

I have since done a lot of fiddling, reading, and rebooting, but
without much luck.  Characteristically, the mouse will respond a
little bit when I first try it, and then stop moving and eventually
disappear (this is on the kdm greeter screen).

The mouse continues to work in other operating systems (although
perhaps it's a little jumpy).  I have also tried reseating it.  It's a
3 button ps/2 Belkin F8E813-PS2.

Can anyone suggest any way to debug (or cure!) this problem?

Also, can anyone recommend a good source for optical 3 button mice?

Thanks.


Further info:

My suspicion is that perhaps the hardware for the mouse (or on the
motherboard?) has gotten subtly worse, and this is stressing my
current software settings.  On the original lockup, I showed very high
CPU useage.

I did do a big upgrade, include X, a few days ago.  I had rebooted
since (I think).

I'm running KDE on a 2.4.27 custom kernel, with devfs.  /dev/psaux is
a symlink.

mdetect doesn't produce any output when I run it, even when I jiggle
the mouse (-v lists devices, but it doesn't report finding anything at
psaux).

My setup was using gpm, though I have tried without it (including
shutting it down).

Here are some current excerpts from my files
-------------- gpm.conf --------------------
device=/dev/misc/psaux
responsiveness=15
repeat_type=ms3
type=ps2
append=''
sample_rate=
----------------------------------------------

---------- XF86Config-4 --------------------
Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Configured Mouse"
	Driver		"mouse"
	Option		"CorePointer"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/gpmdata"
	Option		"Protocol"		"IntelliMouse"
	Option		"ZAxisMapping"		"4 5"
EndSection

# I tried this alternate too
Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Ross Mouse"
	Driver	"mouse"
	Option	"CorePointer"
	Option 	"Device"	"/dev/psaux"
	Option	"Protocol"	"Intellimouse"
	Option	"ZAxisMapping"	"4 5"
EndSection
-------------------------------------------------