Jumping Mouse in LabVIEW with Laptop

[ataranta]

Hi Folks,

I have a Lenovo laptop (Thinkpad W550S) running Windows 7, and I experience some peculiar behavior with my mouse when using LabVIEW.  Whenever I click and drag, the selection box jumps randomly across the screen.  For example, if I click on the front panel and drag just barely downward, the lower right hand corner of the selection box will jump down and to the right by 30 or more grid boxes.  This behavior ONLY OCCURS in LabVIEW.  I don't observe any problems with the mouse in any other program I run on this computer (and I run a ton of other applications on it).  Here are some further notes on the behavior:

- This occurs in both the front panel and the block diagram of any vi 

- The behavior seems to be exacerbated by slow mouse drags - faster drags seems to be ok

- This occurs in both versions of LabVIEW that I have installed (2014 and 2016)

- The behavior also seems to occur in menus - the menu selection will jump to a new one when I'm moving the mouse slowly down a menu list (even when the pointer button isn't clicked)

I have tried doing all of the following:

- Uninstall / reinstall all pointer drivers including mouse, touchpad, etc.

- Disable touchpad and trackpad in BIOS

- Uninstall and disable every pointer related piece of Lenovo software

- Disable / Enable / Modify every imaginable combination of pointer settings in Windows (enhanced pointer precision, pointer speed, etc.)

- Enable / Disable every imaginable combination of settings in Labview (grid on, grid alignment, etc.)

Has anyone else experienced this?  Anyone have thoughts on some further stuff I could try?  If this is a pointer driver problem, then why would it occur only in LabVIEW and not in any other application? 

Thanks so much for the help!!

[ataranta]

I was just attempting to videotape a screen capture and I noticed that when I look at the preview of the LabVIEW window shown in my video capture software (OBS Studio) I can see the cursor jumping.  Yet in the LabVIEW window itself the cursor never jumps, only the selection box.  It looks like the position that the cursor jumps to is ~80 pixels below and ~220 pixels to the right of the current cursor position.  Not sure if any of this is useful, but please let me know if anyone has ideas.

Thanks!

[wiebe@CARYA]

Was it always like this? What triggered this behaviour? 

There seem to be viruses that cause this kind of behaviour, although it's weird that only LabVIEW has the problem.

It might also be the mouse and the touch pad competing. Disabling the touch pad would be my first attempt. The touch pad might have some advanced options, maybe you can auto-disable it when a mouse is attached.

[ataranta]

Thanks for the reply  wiebe@CARYA!

I'm afraid it has always been like this ever since I first installed LabVIEW on this computer.  I have just dealt with the frustration up to this point.  

I have tried disabling the touchpad both in BIOS and in the control panel.  Unfortunately it seems to have no effect.  

I have done basic virus scanning and my computer seems to be healthy.  Do you know of any specific viruses I should be looking for?

[wiebe@CARYA]

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ataranta wrote:

I have tried disabling the touchpad both in BIOS and in the control panel.  Unfortunately it seems to have no effect.  

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Sorry about that, you've mentioned that quite clearly.

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I have done basic virus scanning and my computer seems to be healthy.  Do you know of any specific viruses I should be looking for?

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I just googled "mouse jumping" and "mouse jumping while dragging", and a lot of hits seemed to be virus related. But when this problem has always been there, and only in LabVIEW it seems rather unlikely.

Some other solutions seem to do with video card or a high DPI, but I can only guess.

It could be a Lenovo problem (like this)?

[ataranta]

Thanks for the links!  I will give some of these a try.  I never would have suspected that the Lenovo Energy Management utility might be a culprit...

[koppee1]

We have also seen this behavior on Dell Latitude E7470s. Both my laptop and a coworkers exhibit this behavior and they were fresh laptops with fresh installs of Labview 2014 and Windows 7. I've tried disabling touchpads and touchscreens and see no change. The mouse behaves normally for all other applications. 

[DavidBoyd]

Sorry for the late reply.

No chance you have a serial device (any device - GPS, cash register, serial digital thermometer, etc.) attached to your laptop (typically via USB serial)?

Windows has a very unfortunate habit, on startup, or on USB device discovery, of incorrectly enumerating an actively sending serial device as some sort of mouse.  A serial mouse driver gets loaded, grabs the serial port, and randomly interprets incoming data as mouse activity.  If you check the Windows Device Manager you'll typically see an unexpected serial mouse device under the "Pointing Devices" device group.

This doesn't particularly sound like your issue since you described it as only affecting LabVIEW windows - but something to rule out at least.

If you do find something like this, Google "SkipEnumerations" for one way to rectify the problem.

Dave

[ataranta]

Hi Folks,

Thanks for all the good input, but I'm afraid none of these have worked.  I will keep trying stuff and let you know if I find anything.  

Thanks!

Austin

[ataranta]

So this morning I woke up and fired up LabVIEW, and a couple things happened:

1) All of a sudden I was asked to re-enter my activation codes in a fancy new activation wizard

2) When I did finally launch LabVIEW all the fonts and objects looked much smaller than usual, as though I had increased my screen resolution but only in LabVIEW

Along with these annoyances though, THE MOUSE PROBLEM IS FIXED!!  NO MORE MOUSE JUMPING EVERYWHERE!!!!  HOORAY!! The fact that this problem seems to have fixed itself in my case means that I don't have a clear solution to offer anyone else struggling with this.  This does suggest another avenue for troubleshooting though.  I have always had my windows text size set to a custom value (%136) instead of the default "Normal" (125%).  It never occurred to me that this could be related, but perhaps this was the culprit?