USB mouse driver problems can be difficult to pin down and resolve. USB mouse drivers should simply work… and when they don’t, they really don’t seem to want to start working again. I will attempt to guide you through resolving this stubborn issue.

But if at the end of this article you’re still having problems, I’ll point you to a solution that will work every time.

Before you do anything else, turn your computer off completely. Let it stay off for about a minute, then turn it back on. I know you may be rolling your eyes at this first step, but I can tell you that years of Help Desk work proved that this fixed more problems than any other fix out there.

Now some real work. You need to uninstall and then reinstall your USB mouse drivers.

To do this, right-click on “My Computer” in Windows XP or earlier or “Computer” on Windows Vista or Windows 7. In Windows XP or earlier, select Properties from the drop down menu then in the window that opens select the Device Manager tab. In Windows Vista or Windows 7, select Properties then select Device Manager from the menu on the left side of the screen.

Within the Device Manager select Mouse or other pointing device. By selecting, I mean expand the little plus. Then right click the existing drivers there and select uninstall. Confirm any prompts.

Then reboot. When Windows restarts, the hardware wizard will launch and try to reinstall a USB mouse driver. Let it do its thing this time. Hopefully this will resolve the issue.

If it doesn’t yet work, then do everything I just described again and reboot again. But this time, instead of letting the Wizard select and install your driver for you, click the button to locate the driver manually. After you click this button, navigate to the C:WindowsINF folder. Once this folder is selected, click OK.

If this still doesn’t fix the issue, the proper INF file may not be in your INF folder or the file may be corrupted. The best way to resolve this at this point is to find another computer with the exact same Operating System.

On that computer, navigate to C:WindowsINF and copy all the contents of that directory or folder. Place those on disk or USB drive and transfer them to your computer.

On your computer, first create a backup of the INF folder and create a Restore point. Then copy the contents from the other computer’s INF folder into yours, but do NOT let it overwrite most of your files. You may have to click “No” several times to prevent it from overwriting any files. The ONLY file you want to let it overwrite is any INF file with the word “mouse” in it.

Now repeat the steps I described before… uninstall your USB mouse drivers from the Device Manager and reboot.