Late (last?) generation Intel iMac.
I need a Shaman, Holy Man, or, perhaps, a Witch Doctor. The Ghost in my machine is fighting back.
In summary, my mouse “goes stupid”.
What does that mean?
It means it seems to be sending rogue mouse clicks, mouse clicks to places that are not underneath the pointer, mouse clicks when I type the space bar on my keyboard. As with all things of this nature, it can be intermittent.
This happens with my Bluetooth keyboard. It happens with my USB keyboard. It happens with my BT Mouse, and my MS Wireless Mouse that chats with a USB dongle.
I have removed all of my USB Hubs, all of my external USB drives. It’s just a raw iMac, running a modern Sequoia. I upgraded to Sequoia on the off chance that would do anything.
I have removed the Logi Software for my BT mouse and keyboard. I’m currently on my Apple USB keyboard and MS mouse (pink, with flowers on it).
Recently, after the Sequoia install (and by Install I mean it was an inplace install over my Big Sur, I did not wipe the machine and reload from Time Machine, I don’t know if that would be different or not), it has been stable. Past two days, its gone out to lunch again.
When a restart does fix it, it has to be a power down cold boot, a logout, or restart doesn’t fix it. I have to power off first.
One way I can tell the input system is “sick” is when you go to an applications menu bar, click on a menu, and drag the mouse down. Normally, the menu entries will highlight. That does not happen when the system is sick.
Other things are, as I mentioned, mouse clicks not registered (at least not where the mouse is pointed). Random mouse clicks. You can hover the mouse over something like, say, a link in Safari, and next thing you know I have 5 tabs of whatever that link linked to open.
The fun one is the spacebar. A simple example is a text entry box (like this one). Every time I would hit the spacebar, a mouseclick would be sent. So, imagine the mouse on the same line as the text you’re entering, say, 30% from the left hand margin. As you start to type, all is well until you cross the threshold of the mouse. Then, each time you hit space, the mouse clicks, the caret is now reset to underneath the mouse, and you’re typing in the middle of your sentence. Good times.
I have to consciously keep the mouse in a “safe place”.
I need help diagnosing this. I have no idea how to proceed. Even though I have removed all of the USB stuff on my computer, I don’t actually think it’s a USB problem, considering it manifests of Bluetooth as well. So it must be something else.
I’ve reset the parameter RAM, I’ve done other things (that I don’t remember to be honest), but it’s all been pretty deep, arcane stuff.
I don’t know if I can hang a dtrace off of something that can perhaps highlight showing the rogue device inputs. Not that it would fix it, but maybe it would give me more data.
I have not seeing any gross, obvious errors in the logs (but the logs are legion in size, so that may not be saying anything). I don’t know if USB and BT are unified internally into the same peripheral device system, and something is wrong with that. At this point I’m guessing it’s a hardware problem (and woe is me if it is, me thinks, it’s an iMac with one moving part).
Any insight appreciated.
