kevin havener <havenerk@thunder.safb.af.mil> wrote:
>2.  As far as I can tell the machine came from the factory broken.  I've
>owned it for over 5 years now, and I'm plagued by a problem of having a
>frozen cursor on bootup.  That is, the screen comes on, the cursor
>appears, and it is frozen--does not respond to the mouse.  I can hit the
>reset switch (at that instant) to reboot a time or two and it will
>finally recognize mouse input.  This problem repeats itself randomly.
>In other words, the computer often boots just fine.
>
>        a.  Does anyone know what causes this behavior?  It has
>persisted through endless extension deconflicting sessions, several
>MacOS system upgrades, the keyboard change, etc.  What hardware should I
>suspect?  I think, but am not sure, the problem persists whether the
>mouse is plugged into the keyboard or either one of the ports on the
>back of the machine.  I haven't swapped the mouse out yet, so does
>anyone have any advice on an appropriate MacBSD compatible 3-button
>mouse? Since the problem is intermittent, it's damn hard to figure out
>what I've changed since the last time I booted the $@%&!

Silly question: Do the tab and arrow keys work when the mouse is acting up?
If so, it's definitely the mouse! In that case, you could get even get
around without a mouse, using the arrows, Apple-O, and Apple-W. If, on the
other hand, the Mac really is freezing up hard just after the menu bar is
drawn, the usual suspects are Apple Menu Items, or a corrupted desktop
file. For the first, delete the Apple Menu Items prefs, or try to do
without the extension for a while, just long enough to see if the problem
reappears. For the other, the most foolproof way to rebuild a corrupted
desktop is to make the desktop files visible with ResEdit, drag them to the
trash, and reboot.


Fred Bruckman               URL:http://www.enteract.com/~fb