{"id":504,"date":"2012-09-22T06:59:13","date_gmt":"2012-09-22T04:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.asym.dk\/?p=504"},"modified":"2012-09-22T06:59:13","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T04:59:13","slug":"im-puzzled-and-bugged-an-odd-mouse-click-problem-on-win7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/2012\/09\/22\/im-puzzled-and-bugged-an-odd-mouse-click-problem-on-win7\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#039;m Puzzled and Bugged: An odd mouse click problem on Win7"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Updated 12th October: Problem has vanished! Read below.<\/em><br \/>\nI&#8217;ve come across a very annoying and strange defect on my Windows 7 laptop. It really bugs me!<br \/>\nHere are the patterns I&#8217;m seeing:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sometimes, the minimize\/restore\/close buttons don&#8217;t light up when I hover the mouse above them. Clicking them has no effect. Whenever this happens, Alt-Tab&#8217;ing to another window and than Alt-Tab&#8217;ing back again restores them and they work again.<\/li>\n<li>In Firefox, this happens as soon as I have clicked <em>once<\/em> somewhere inside the window.<\/li>\n<li>The same applies to Thunderbird, my e-mail application.<\/li>\n<li>Mouse clicks in popup windows sometimes end up in the window <em>below<\/em> the pop up window. E.g. clicking the close button on a popup window does not close the window, but does something in the window below it.<\/li>\n<li>Other applications don&#8217;t seem to suffer from the problem, but has other types of odd mouse behaviour.<\/li>\n<li>In Libre Office, I can&#8217;t click-and-drag to select text any more. Text selection is only possible by keyboard.<\/li>\n<li>The scroll wheel doesn&#8217;t work in Internet Explorer<\/li>\n<li>Capture One Pro 6 (a photo editing application), dragging sliders (to control photo appearance) no longer works.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m puzzled and bugged. But I&#8217;ll find out what&#8217;s wrong.<br \/>\nOh and, by the way: I <em>have <\/em>tried restarting. It doesn&#8217;t help.<br \/>\n<strong><em>&#8212; Update 23rd September:<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nAs per Michael Boltons suggestion, I connected a new mouse: A Wacom tablet. It didn&#8217;t change anything.<br \/>\nI ran Windows update and Sony&#8217;s own update tool to update various drivers. It also didn&#8217;t change anything.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m pretty sure the problem started in the middle of the week. At first, I just thought it needed a restart and I was too lazy to do so, so it might have been there for a few days before I reacted. I haven&#8217;t installed any software, but I have run Windows update. The update log shows this:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/asymaps.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/09\/updates.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-508\" title=\"updates\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/asymaps.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/09\/updates.png?w=300\" height=\"130\" width=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/updates.png 1049w, http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/updates-300x130.png 300w, http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/updates-1024x444.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/updates-768x333.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nI&#8217;ll try to uninstall the Silverlight update, as I&#8217;m suspecting it as &#8216;new and fancy technology&#8217; might put in hooks in odd places in Windows.<br \/>\n<strong>&#8212; Update 12th October<\/strong><br \/>\nI have a confession: The problem went and came back a few times, and now it&#8217;s gone completely. I feel like a lousy tester since I haven&#8217;t been able to dig out what caused it. Uninstalling software didn&#8217;t help, updating drivers didn&#8217;t help either, and even updating various software from Firefox, Thunderbird and Capture One Pro did not change mouse behaviour. I&#8217;m let with a well working laptop (that&#8217;s good!), the memory of a very annoying problem, and some lousy theories about what caused the problem.<br \/>\nIs this a case of a system error, which cannot be understood in the sense that there was a single <em>cause<\/em>, but has to be analyzed using a system perspective: A system of thousands of components interacting in complex ways? Like I suggest we analyse <a title=\"The Next Problem in Black Swan\u00a0Testing\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.asym.dk\/2012\/05\/09\/the-next-problem-in-black-swan-testing\/\">Black Swans in IT systems<\/a>?<br \/>\nIn that case, did something <a title=\"Turning up the\u00a0Heat\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.asym.dk\/2012\/07\/17\/turning-up-the-heat\/\">turn up the heat<\/a>? I was a bit stressed myself at the time, but no &#8211; I don&#8217;t think my mental state affected this. And I can&#8217;t think of something.<br \/>\nMy best guess is that a Firefox plugin for html debugging in combination with a specific version of the application and possibly some driver issues somehow &#8216;turned up the heat&#8217; causing the problem to materialize. But it&#8217;s only a guess.<br \/>\n(By the way: I could have done like most would probably do: Reinstalled the pc or bought a new one. But just a few weeks before I <em>did <\/em>actually reinstall it completely with a new SSD and more RAM.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Updated 12th October: Problem has vanished! Read below. I&#8217;ve come across a very annoying and strange defect on my Windows 7 laptop. It really bugs me! Here are the patterns I&#8217;m seeing: Sometimes, the minimize\/restore\/close buttons don&#8217;t light up when I hover the mouse above them. Clicking them has no effect. Whenever this happens, Alt-Tab&#8217;ing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[13,38,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}