Mouse Driver Problems

I bought a new Dell computer a few months ago. Instead of using the Dell mouse that came with it, I continued to use the mouse I had with my old computer. It's nothing fancy, just an optical mouse with two buttons and a wheel.

But now the mouse often doesn't work... it will work for a few seconds then the red optical light turns off, the pointer stops moving and windows informs me that a USB device has been removed. I have to unplug the mouse from the USB port and plug it back in. The mouse will then work for a short amount of time, from 1 second to a few minutes and it will happen again. Obviously I can't go on like this and I need to use a different mouse.

The problem is, even though my other mouse is just a basic Dell optical mouse, Vista cannot detect/install the drivers for it. It appears in Device Manager as either unknown device or as a mouse device that the drivers could not be installed. I get a message along the lines of 'the driver could not be installed... the inf for this device was made for Windows 95 or later'.

I started thinking that it could be a problem with the USB port rather than the devices. I plugged the mouse with intermittant power problems into a different USB socket. Windows tries to install different drivers for the same mouse when it is plugged into any other socket than the one it has always been plugged in (I have 6 USB ports on my computer and my printer/keyboard/pen drive etc all work fine). This fails and the mouse doesn't work. If the mouse is plugged into the same old socket, it works... intermittently... and then shuts down every few seconds/minutes as before.

I consider myself to be pretty IT savvy, I've tried all the obvious stuff like removing all optical devices from device manager, telling device manager to search different places for a better driver, but it is always convinced that it already has the best driver, even though the mouse doesn't work. I've done google searches for Dell USB mouse drivers, but couldn't find anything. It's absolutely ridiculous that Vista cannot do something as simple as install a USB mouse driver.

So now I have a computer with no usable mouse. Please help

Thanks

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