- Sometimes when browsing in IE, the text cursor changes to display a dot with black triangles above and below, enclosed in a larger circle. The mouse cursor then becomes a dot with a black triangle (arrow) on one side or another, and acts like how I imagine a rollerball / mousewheel does (N.B. it's not a wheel mouse), i.e. moving the mouse cursor above/below the 'text cursor' circle described above scrolls the page up / down / left / right / diagonally. I can't categorize when the mouse starts behaving this way -- it seems random to me -- and any time I press Escape, click the mouse or try to take a screenshot with PrintScrn, it reverts to the normal cursor.
- In Excel 2000, if I click anywhere, I get stuck into a 'selecting range' kind of mode, so as my move my mouse lots of cells get highlighted, as though I had the left button held down. Clicking either button, pressing escape etc. has no effect -- the only way out is to close down Excel from a right-click on the TaskBar (it is possible to move the cursor outside the Excel window, although Excel continues scrolling madly and selecting hundreds of cells until it's closed down).
- Drag & Drop for files in Windows Explorer looks as though it's working (no "No Entry" signs etc.) but doesn't actually move or copy anything. Same with either left or right mouse button. Context menus work fine, including e.g. Cut & Paste.
- Drag & Drop text inside e.g. Internet Explorer also appears to work, but doesn't actually do anything. However, Drag & Drop text inside MS-Word works fine.
- Clicking on an app window that is already open, whether in the TaskBar or on screen, doesn't always work (but does sometimes).
Some web pages indicated that some of the above behaviour might be related to the Blaster worm, but I have checked specifically for this (in addition to some all-round virus checks) and it is not detected.
One suspicion I have is that this might be connected with Zone Alarm, as (in the CoolWeb panic) I put all settings on high which disabled just about everything -- but now that my system appears clean of malware I'm reenabling everything I get asked for, and it hasn't helped. Also, shutting down Zone Alarm does not rectify the various problems above.
Any ideas?