[WEB4LIB] Re: mice freezeups in Netscape?

[Diana Calder]

Thursday, October 12, 2000, 1:08:42 PM, Julia Schult wrote:

JS> Dan Kissane wrote:

>> I am running NT workstation 4.0 with NEtscape 4.7 for public access
>> computers. Recently, these machine have begun to experience mice freezups
>> when in Netscape, that is, all of a sudden they are unable to click on
>> links. Has anyone experienced this that may be able to help me fix it?
>> thanks. I did install the latest mouse drivers (MS Wheel Mouse). Thanks
>> again.

JS> This is the same problem I have queried the list about before, and no, no one
JS> seems to have the definitive answer yet.  However I have learned some more
JS> about what I call the "Netscape link-click problem."

JS> I have not been able to determine what causes the problem; it seems to occur
JS> just about anytime when running Netscape Navigator 4.08 and occasionally even
JS> in Netscape Communicator 4.75.  It tends to occur in clusters on our public
JS> machines, which for a while made me wonder if it was related to static, but I
JS> tried anti-static sprays to no avail.  Thank you for confirming that it
JS> occurs on NT machines; we are running Win 95.  I wondered whether it has
JS> anything to do with the wheeled mice (mouses?) but I believe it has happened
JS> on some of our office computers that do not have the wheeled Intellimouses
JS> which our public machines use.

It is not unique to Netscape. I have also had it occur in Opera 4.02
and IE 5.x (fewer occurrences in IE, but since I only use IE to access
Microsoft's site or sites that crash Opera, the frequency is probably
about the same). With Opera, sometimes doing a Shift-Reload will
"cure" the problem for that page. If not, emptying the cache then
doing a Shift-Reload almost always works. Very, very rarely, it may
be necessary to exit Opera, wait a few seconds, then restart it to
solve the problem. I've never had to restart the computer for either
Opera or IE. With IE 5.x, the Shift-Refresh trick occasionally works,
emptying the cache then doing a Shift-Refresh sometimes works, and
exiting and restarting IE always works (but you have to exit all
windows if you have more than one IE window open). I've only had a few
reports of this occurring on the public machines, but I've had it
occur more than often enough on my own machine at work (NT4
Workstation, SP6a) and my machine at home (Win98). I'm running IE 5.5
on both machines now, but I had the same problem before upgrading from
5.0 to 5.5, so it's not a 5.5 issue. (And in spite of the fact that
many people have reported problems with IE 5.5, I've been happier with
it than with 5.0 and have had no problems on any of the machines I've
upgraded, including the public ones. However, I "prepared" each
machine for the install by doing a thorough scandisk and defrag, plus
I downloaded IE 5.5, burned it to CD, and installed from the CD rather
than letting IE do a "live" update directly from MS's update page.) I
have noticed that, in most cases, the problem seems to occur after the
browser has been running for a while (30 minutes+) or has been to a
fairly large number (20+) of pages. As far as a possible connection
with a wheel-mouse goes, I do use one at work, but I use a Logitech
trackball at home and I've seen this happen on a Win95 OSR2 computer
with a regular two-button-no-wheel mouse, so I don't think that the
wheel-mouse theory holds up.  I'm not 100% sure whether the
Shift-Reload trick or emptying the cache then Shift-Reloading will
work with Netscape, but it's worth a try.  I suspect that the
problem is Windows-related (maybe something in the TCP/IP stack or ...?)
rather than related to a specific browser or piece of hardware.  I
don't think that I've ever seen the problem on a machine that hadn't
been upgraded to IE 5.x ...

Diana Calder
Automation Technician
Essex County Library
Essex, ON
Canada