SOLUTION Mouse trouble

In the original post I snip

I've fixed my "mouse trouble". The synopsis of the problem is that my system would lock up, being unresponsive to anything except that I could still move the mouse pointer left & right. Sometimes the system would spontaneously reboot. All of these problems started when I clicked a button on the mouse.

I tried a number of distributions, Mandriva being my goal, and found that only SuSE 9.2 Live worked at first. Then I found an errata on Mandriva's site mentioning a number, maybe 6, serious bugs related to both X.org 6.9 and ATI drivers for my ATI Radeon card. None of these bugs was what I was experiencing, but I took a shot at it anyway. I installed the "free" version of Mandriva 2006.0 and configured the display as VESA, which was the suggested work-around for the other video driver problems. Wouldn't you know, it worked right away!

Then I tried Mandriva's 2006.0 PowerPack with VESA, no luck at all; it seems that some portion of the Radeon driver was loaded even though I specified VESA. A couple weeks ago Mandriva announced their "December Club" release of the 2006.0 PowerPack (for Mandriva Club members) which includes video driver fixes, and all the updates up to that time. The "December Club" release wouldn't install. As it turns out the "cooker" GPG key which signed all the newer packages was missing from their RPM key data on the release CDs. I reverted to a fresh install of 2006.0 PowerPack. Then I found the GPG key which was needed, and imported it using rpm. This was enough to allow an 'upgrade' (not 'install') of the "December Club" release. When I did the upgrade I chose the Radeon (fglrx) driver and the X.org option to *avoid* 3D acceleration.

Everything works fine now. I'm a bit timid, after spending all that effort getting things to work, regarding testing the 3D hardware acceleration. But, I will get around to that.

Whew....

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