Mouse clicks disabled by USB Headset / Mouse Combo?!

English Hardware
1

Weird bug shows sometimes after booting, sometimes after up to ~30min of usage: all mouse clicks are ignored and the active screen edges of my KDE Desktop stop working, but the mouse cursor still moves normally. The bug immediately vanishes if I unplug either my USB headset or my USB mouse, but shows immediately upon replugging. Mouse-clicks from all connected pointing devices are ignored, not just the particular USB mouse whose unplugging causes the problem to vanish.

**Isn’t this weird? If the mouse pointer moves normally, how can the active screen edges even stop working?
**(Active screen edge: moving curser over the screen edge, e.g. top edges causes all windows to be presented, bottom edges minimizes all windows, etc. - the assigned effects can still be triggered by keyboard shortcuts, so the effect itself is working.)

I appreciate any suggestions on how to investigate the matter further. The problem is weird and very hardware specific, so I don’t expect filing a KDE bug report at this point will help anyone.

My hardware:

  • Logitech M570 Trackmann wireless , USB Unifying Receiver (only ever used with this Trackmann)
  • Logitech G930 Headset wireless, has its own unique USB Transceiver
  • Dell Precision M4500 Laptop:
    [LIST]
  • two built-in pointers: 3-button touch pad & 3-button trackpoint, both working fine otherwise
  • Suse 12.1 with all packages being regularly updated (standard repositories + packmann + KDE4.8 + nvidia binary driver)
  • KDE 4.8.4
  • Linux 3.1.10-1.16-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT
  • single screen setup, using the laptops internal screen only (I do use DualHead/TwinView sometimes)

[/LIST]

Note that I can exclude a hardware fault, since there is no problem at all in simultaneously using both Logitech devices with that Laptop under Windows7 (about once a week I do 1-3 hours of gaming).

2

On 07/20/2012 10:36 AM, STurtle wrote:
> all mouse clicks are ignored and the active screen edges of my
> KDE Desktop stop working, but the mouse cursor still moves normally. The
> bug immediately vanishes if I unplug either my USB headset or my USB
> mouse, but shows immediately upon replugging. Mouse-clicks from all
> connected pointing devices are ignored, not just the particular USB
> mouse whose unplugging causes the problem to vanish.

i guess you may be seeing the results of your machine running out of
CPU resources (that is to say that something is fully occupying the CPU
and therefore it can’t service calls for mouse clicks, or to keep KDE
running along smoothly)…

so, i do not suppose i can help a lot, but it might be useful to,
immediately after a fresh boot, to start top in a konsole, and arrange
your desktop so that you can see it…that is, use all other windows
sized so that you can always see what top is doing…then do some stuff
(whatever you normally do) and when the problem shows up:

  • look to see what is grabbing all the CPU, and how much memory is that
    thing using…

  • then, unplug the headset and see how top responds…did the USB
    activity knock something off the top spot and cause that CPU drain to
    vanish?

  • plug the headset back in–what do you see in top? what jumps to the
    top of top as your mouse clicks begin to be ignored?

oh, and does this happen only when browsing the web? or watching (say) a
youtube…or using Flash in any way?

and, when you say “all packages being regularly updated (standard
repositories + packmann + . . .” what do you mean?

that is, updating via zypper, with what command line input?

or by YaST Online Update?

or by apper? (do NOT do that)

or using YaST Software Manager and 'switch vendor? or what ? (questions
stems from the possibility that conflicting software may have
inadvertently been installed…please show us the terminal input/output
from:


zypper lr -d

copy/paste the in/output back to this thread using the instructions
here: http://goo.gl/i3wnr

–
dd

3

I have just resolved a similar problem by downgrading the kernel to 3.1.10-1.9-desktop from 3.1.10-1.16-desktop. There are no extra devices attached to my thinkpad, x121e.

With the 1.16 kernel, the trackpoint system stopped working, and vanished from the hardware listing in YaST. I suspect a driver issue.

I’ve put output from YaST Hardware Information for both kernels on the web at <http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~mdc/suse/>, as k10-1.16.hardware and k10-1.9.hardware. Note that the entry for Trackpoint goes missing between 1.9 and 1.16.

Hope this helps!