Help! No mouse function.

A customer brought his PC to me today for malware cleaning. I have tried six or seven different PC mice, wired and wireless, and cannot get the mouse function to work. Keyboard works. When I plug the mouse in Windows sees it and says it successfully installed a driver but the mouse still doesn't work. I tried sfc /scannow from command prompt in Safe Mode but did not fix the problem and bad files were found and repaired but apparently not the one for the mouse function. When I boot from a Windows PE rescue disc I have mouse function so that tells me there is likely a broken driver file or system file in Windows. Any ideas?

Check the irq's and make sure the mouse isn't conflicting with something else. Pretty safe to assume you tried different usb ports ofc.

Have you tried a ps/2 mouse? That has its own irq port that nothing else can use.

have you tried to fully uninstall the drivers first then a new reinstall the drivers, just a suggestion , could be some confliction there, i have found that to be the case before

bob4933 said:

Check the irq's and make sure the mouse isn't conflicting with something else. Pretty safe to assume you tried different usb ports ofc.

Yes, tried different USB ports. As far as checking the IRQs for a conflict, what is the best way to do that? Keep in mind that any navigation must be done at this point with the keyboard and is very difficult.

Have you tried a ps/2 mouse? That has its own irq port that nothing else can use.

There are no PS2 ports built into the motherboard but I did try a PS2 mouse via a USB adapter.

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Ozz1 said:

have you tried to fully uninstall the drivers first then a new reinstall the drivers, just a suggestion , could be some confliction there, i have found that to be the case before

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There are no drivers to uninstall. These are just generic typed mice I have been trying, not gaming mice that need special drivers. When I go into Control Panel>Mouse no mouse shows up in the hardware tab of the mouse configuration windows. And no mouse shows up in Device Manager either.

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I took the hard drive out of the machine and put it in my computer's USB docking cradle. Scanned it with Malwarebytes and Eset Online scanner. Found about 50 malware elements including several variants of that nasty Conduit thing.

It all adds up to corrupted system files in my opinion. Time for a destructive, fresh install of Windows. Now I just have to convince the customer to let me do that. I backed up his data already.

Yep, was thinking this was the issue. I usually default to nuke/install to save time, anyway.

Dlaw said:

Yep, was thinking this was the issue. I usually default to nuke/install to save time, anyway.

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In process. Customer's brought his mouse over and it didn't work any better. Which, I knew it wouldn't be he needed to see for himself.

can't you just copy the file, c:\windows\system32\DRIVERS\mouseclass.sys
and c:\windows\system32\DRIVERS\mouhid.sys from another copy of windows?

caddi daddi said:

can't you just copy the file, c:\windows\system32\DRIVERS\mouseclass.sys
and c:\windows\system32\DRIVERS\mouhid.sys from another copy of windows?

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If that were my only concern with the brokenness of this system your solution may have worked. But I'm sure other things are corrupted so it was time to do a wipe and fresh install. But thanks for your suggestion. I'll keep that in mind.

must have been one of my old systems that I sold, I'm sorry for you.