Had your mouse started to jump around the screen? It's a real pain. You move one way, and the mouse pointer accidently darts off in completely different direction. Usually the pointer will jump from the middle of the screen (where you intend it to be) to the upper right corner, lower left corner, or some other border of the screen area.

Sometimes the mouse just goes completely crazy, leaping off in random location every 5 minutes. If you are clicking mouse button(s) at the moment, it could do a bunch or random things on the fly, like moving or resizing the taskbar, selecting and deselecting all of the desktop icons, creating additional shortcuts for some of the icons, resizing an open windows etc.

This is especially frustrating on multi-monitor systems when mouse cursor can completely go out of the visible area of the primary monitor into desktop space of secondary monitor, simply disappearing and not reappearing again even after intensive mouse movement.

Switching mices, interfaces (between PS/2 and USB), updating the drivers doesn't help. Nobody has idea what causes this. Presumably, some incompatibility of the surface under the mouse with mouse firmware which analyzes optical data.

After recording hundreeds of such events, statistically analyzing them, and developing relevant math model, I have developed a Windows software which is able to tell apart normal mouse movements from jump-outs. Normal mouse movements are allowed, jump-outs are filtered out.