Mouse sensitivity suddenly changed

[Bill Davidsen]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> This is a really odd one, I have a keyboard and PS/2 mouse on a KVM
>> switch, accessing four Linux system. All of a sudden the mouse
>> sensitivity changed to "dead slow" on one machine. I checked the
>> settings in preferences, and tried (a) another account and later (b)
>> KDE, mouse is slow in all cases. Sensitivity is high on the other
>> three machines.
>>
>> FC13, GNOME2 (hasn't changed in ages, it's a host for five VMs
>> (i7-950+24GB RAM). Really annoying, can anyone suggest a cause?
>
> The KVM? It used to be that they were a regular bane of this list. Some
> of them don’t do PS/2 properly (Belkin got a lot of bad press), and the
> mouse and computer can get confused.
>
> You probably don’t want to do this, but what happens if you reset the
> physical computer, leaving the KVM switched to that computer while it
> restarts?
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> James.
>
It's a perfectly good suggestion, I had tried doing a full power cycle 
and cold boot before posting, and it didn't help. I didn't provide that 
info, and perhaps should have. I also restarted X, dropped from r/l5 to 
r/l3, and nothing changed.

Then I went to dinner, an archery banquet, and when I returned the mouse 
was normal again. Running top previously didn't reveal any obvious 
memory, CPU, hogs, but it is totally possible that something was beating 
the machine, perhaps a RAID event, although the disk light was not on 
and the logs don't show it.The firewall rule counts on the firewall look 
normal, suggesting that there was no network storm, so I'm puzzled, but 
working again.

I _hate_ things that "go away" because they tend to come back, and you 
can't examine them or recreate them. This condition persisted through a 
power cycle (real cold boot, I unplugged until the "got main power" LED 
on the mobo went out.

Thanks for the help, I have no doubt I will reprise the question at some 
time.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot