Randomly Jumping Cursor

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On a new install of Windows 8.1 Pro with all updates, the cursor will occasionally jump to a new position on the screen with no mouse input. If this happens just as I do some keystrokes or mouse clicks, the result can be random chaos – moving focus to another window changing size of or deleting windows, selecting and deleting random chunks of text, etc. The jump is almost always upward and to the right, typically an inch or two, but sometimes halfway across the screen.

Searching the net for this behavior turns up lots of similar problems with touchpads on laptop machines, but I have a desktop pc with no touchpad.

I initially assumed a defective mouse – but I’ve tried several different mice that work fine on other computers. I suspected rf interference on the wireless mouse channel – but found that the problem still occurs with a hardwired usb mouse. Then I discovered that the cursor jumps occasionally with no mouse connected at all. I also disconnected the wireless keyboard and the jumping still occurred.

The jumps happen somewhat randomly, averaging about one every 50 seconds. The shortest interval I’ve noticed was 14 seconds, the longest about 3 minutes.

Anyone got any ideas? diagnostic advice?

My gut feel says it’s a software problem. My next steps will be to boot in safe mode and/or start uninstalling all non-essential software.

but just in case the hardware is relevant: This is a recently home-built machine that’s running perfectly in all other respects: Asus x99-Deluxe motherboard, i7-5960X cpu; no unusual peripherals – just a vanilla DVD burner, Samsung SSD system drive, one Western Digital hdd. Two displays on an AMD Radeon R9-290X GPU

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I have the same problem with my laptop WIN 7. The only remedy I found to work is reboot.

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Have you checked all the hardware connections inside the box?

Joe

--Joe

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Additional informaton: The jumping cursor problem does not occur when I boot in safe mode (with networking), but returns when I reboot in normal mode. While running is safe mode, I changed the default low resolution back to the full resolution of the displays and then worked with Email and browser for a couple of hours with no problem. I think this rules out hardware problems. But I’m not sure where to to next.

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I think this rules out hardware problems. But I’m not sure where to to next.

Suggest you try clean boot for troubleshooting further as the link describes:

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-of-windows-8-and-windows-8-1-to-diagnose-issues/

Rich

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W8.1 (with all updates etc)
I’ve noticed something similar but less frequent behavior; just once in a booted session, and that’s after logging onto the system and opening my wifi connection to the internet.
The mouse cursor jumps to another part of the screen, it does so consistantly, but I’ve never seen it do it at any other time.

I’m thinking it’s a driver, but given the rarity, I don’t want to play around with a
device that is working properly (wifi card device with extremely rare driver updates)

It’s either a driver, or it has something to do with some component of W8.1, as I don’t recall this behavior in Windows 8.
If the behavior is not replicated in a safe mode boot, I’ll tend to believe it’s more driver related.

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Quote: On a new install of Windows 8.1 Pro with all updates, the cursor will occasionally jump to a new position on the screen with no mouse input.

I won’t bore you with the many days of diagnostics, uninstalling everything that wasn’t essential, stopping all nonessential services, booting in various diagnostic and “safe” modes, updating drivers, etc. This was all fruitless. The problem went away in “Safe Mode”, but not in any other configurations.

The problem was: In Device Manager, under “Mice and other Pointing devices”, there were three devices listed – two identical instances of “HID-compliant Mouse” plus a “Microsoft Serial Ball Point”. Right-clicking on the latter and clicking “disable” solved the problem – no more random cursor jumping.

Turns out that this is a very old and well-known bug that still exists in Windows 8.1. If Windows sees data arriving on a serial port (including virtual serial ports created by USB-to-Serial adapters), it installs this driver, which is for a 20-year-old Microsoft mouse intended to be connected to a serial port. This obsolete driver responds to any arriving serial data by moving the cursor.

This bug is well documented on the net (see for example https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/61e2c50d-f434-4d44 ).

But since RS-232 serial devices are rather rare these days, it’s a very rare problem. I am running a Davis weather station that I bought 13 years ago (and which came on the market a number of years before that). It has only a serial connection to the computer. I’m connecting it via an active Serial-to-USB adapter, which caused the obsolete driver to be installed.

Interestingly, while diagnosing the problem, I had disconnected this adapter, and the cursor continued to jump around even with no serial data flowing – weird. It wasn’t until I disabled the driver that the problem went away.

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Glad you got it resolved. Nice detective work!!

Thanks for posting your solution.

Joe

--Joe

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