Author Topic: Death to serial mice! (Windows)  (Read 1241 times)

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Offline RenateTopic starter

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Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« on: July 09, 2020, 07:26:00 pm »
Yes, we've been fighting this for decades.
You plug in some serial device into a Windows box and Windows says, "OMG, it must be a serial mouse!"

Yes, you can disable the service, but it might get turned on behind your back.
All of this stuff is protected with the Windows SFC.

My solution is to copy and edit \Windows\INF\msmouse.inf
Remove anything that you distrust, especially sermouse and anything that is not HID.
Then you need to "takeown" of the destination, copy the file over and "icacls" it to have only read permission.
Finally, go to devmgmt.msc, View > Show Hidden Devices and delete anything that you don't like.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2020, 07:32:44 pm »
I don't think I've ever seen this. What kind of devices are getting recognized as serial mice?
 

Offline RenateTopic starter

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Re: Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« Reply #2 on: July 09, 2020, 07:43:40 pm »
What kind of devices are getting recognized as serial mice?
About anything that spits out a few chars.
USB GPS units that just spit out NMEA when they are plugged in are one case.
I'm not sure about the current state of things but Windows used to actually poke devices to see if they quacke-ed like a mouse.
Present case: A Digilent CMOD A7 that Windows would snarf the serial debug interface.
 

Offline RenateTopic starter

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Re: Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2020, 08:00:50 pm »
Erm, well, kind-of works.
Now it won't load a driver for a mouse, but it still keeps squawking about  SERENUM\BALLPOINT\8&12DE5EC0&1&0000.
Sheesh.
 

Offline ArthurDent

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Re: Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« Reply #4 on: July 09, 2020, 08:09:03 pm »
This isn't a new problem and not just USB but other serial ports as well. Anyone who has used a GPS receiver with an RS232 port and a mouse has probably tried to use the mouse and found that the pointer has jumped randomly to some other location on the screen. If the GPS puts out some data string every second this 'psycho' mouse will drive you nuts. Sometimes not turning on the serial device until after the computer has booted and recognized the real mouse will prevent this. Here's what one company said about this in 2011.

https://www.sealevel.com/support/how-to-fix-crazy-mouse-syndrome-with-usb-serial-adapters/
 

Offline MarkMLl

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Re: Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« Reply #5 on: July 09, 2020, 08:22:14 pm »
I don't think I've ever seen this. What kind of devices are getting recognized as serial mice?

I've certainly seen it, back before I abandoned Windows, but an adequate fix was to give it a boot-time option to disable automatic serial mouse detection: the actual drivers were smart enough to not cause problems.

MarkMLl
 

Offline RenateTopic starter

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Re: Death to serial mice! (Windows)
« Reply #6 on: July 09, 2020, 08:33:59 pm »
Brilliant!
(That is an "advanced" function of the serial driver and is not found on the stock COM1.)

Also, it's not just a question of boot time if you are unplugging and resetting devices.
 


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