Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Death to serial mice! (Windows)
Renate:
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.
james_s:
I don't think I've ever seen this. What kind of devices are getting recognized as serial mice?
Renate:
--- Quote from: james_s on July 09, 2020, 07:32:44 pm ---What kind of devices are getting recognized as serial mice?
--- End quote ---
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.
Renate:
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.
ArthurDent:
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/
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