The mouse on our Toshiba Windows 8 laptop suddenly stopped working. The mouse does not appear on the screen with all the panels, or the desktop. But it does appear on the login screen and the screen with all the user options. This problem is only occurring on the admin account. Does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix this problem?

Follow general hardware troubleshooting step in Windows 8 Troubleshooting Hardware Compatibility Issues on Windows 8 .

Try uninstall mouse driver and reinstall it.

• Marked as answer by Leo HuangMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Monday, March 18, 2013 8:30 AM

Follow general hardware troubleshooting step in Windows 8 Troubleshooting Hardware Compatibility Issues on Windows 8 .

Try uninstall mouse driver and reinstall it.

• Marked as answer by Leo HuangMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Monday, March 18, 2013 8:30 AM

i find it funny how everyone is saying Re-install drivers as you have no mouse to use and the keyboard is hard to use to navigate in Win8 compared to Win7/XP

• Edited by billz_4u Monday, September 09, 2013 9:17 AM

i find it funny how everyone is saying Re-install drivers as you have no mouse to use and the keyboard is hard to use to navigate in Win8 compared to Win7/XP

• Edited by billz_4u Monday, September 09, 2013 9:17 AM

Which Windows 8 patch is breaking the mouse?

I have encountered this problem on several recent patches on three different machines: two laptops and a desktop.  After reading other related pages in TechNet, my best guess is that the installation of a patch causes Win8.1 to rebuild/reload/or-otherwise-muck-with its USB drivers, and sometimes this process fails to complete properly. Sometimes the problem resolves itself after another boot or two. Sometimes the problem reappears with some really nasty behaviour (e.g. having the mouse randomly shift around the screen -- in one case wreaking havoc with my partner's Outlook files).  Often it's only a partial failure of the mouse, e.g. on my laptop I usually just lose the use of the left-mouse button.  Eventually I'm sure MS will track down this bug (or bug-cluster) and fix it but in the meantime I'd suggest the following workarounds:

1.  If you're using a laptop with an external mouse, unplug it whenever it misbehaves and shift to using the touchpad or whatever mouse-replacement is builtin to your laptop.

2.  If you're using a desktop, purchase an inexpensive backup mouse.  Not a bad idea to have one of these anyway -- mice don't live forever so if your "main mouse" is misbehaving your first port of call should be to try another one!

3.  Having a spare keyboard is also a good idea IMHO.  I haven't experienced keyboard failures myself -- thank goodness! -- but other threads in TechNet complain about this, and I *suspect* it's a closely-related issue to the mouse failure.  Anyway; if you have a working keyboard and some wizardly person is nearby, they'll know all of the strange (and hard-to-remember!) tricks for driving a Windows box solely from the keyboard (after unplugging the misbehaving mouse ;-)

I *suspect* that all of this difficulty arises because the Windows team is trying to address some security problems (e.g. the possibility that some malicious software might be monitoring -- or even controlling -- your mouse or keyboard, if you don't have good anti-virus protection on your box) and/or because they have overshot a bit when trying to minimise the boot-time on a Windows box.  A fast boot-time is a very desirable feature but -- of course -- if the existing boot-image is defective or stale, and this defect isn't detected & repaired during the next boot, this defect could manifest as a malfunctioning USB device (or in many other ways...)