On 26 May 98 at 12:19, Holli Van Nest wrote:

> I have a computer on which the mouse stopped working.  I've removed
> the mouse, reinstalled it, both manually and having Windows detect
> it.  It's a serial mouse.  I have also installed a known working
> serial mouse.  After doing this several times in several ways, I
> realized that there are no com ports showing in the System settings.
> When I go into Control Panel, System, Ports, only the printer port,
> LPT1, shows; there are no com ports.  I guess this is the problem
> with the mouse.  :-)
>
> My question - does this mean the com port is blown?  Or is there
> something in Windows '95 that could cause this?  There's no modem on
> this machine and nothing has been changed on it in at least 2 months.

  For reasons which escape me (I wouldn't have believed this myself,
but I've now seen it several times...), Win95 sometimes has trouble
seeing serial mice.  The easiest solution is to install a DOS serial
mouse driver by way of CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT (depending on
whether this drive is a .SYS or .COM file).
  Win95 will detect this driver at startup, and cleanly take over the
mouse from the driver.  This works much more reliably than expecting
Win95 to notice that there is a mouse attached.

David G