This isn’t headline news or anything, but it sure is annoying when OS features that have worked fine for years suddenly stop working. Case in point, I purchased a new Kensington Orbit trackball yesterday and figured I could just unplug my old microsoft USB mouse and plug this in, and it would just work. No drivers are required for the trackball,  as its a USB HID compliant device.

Did it work? No. No mouse cursor movement at all. Windows 7 sees the new device, but it pops up an error saying it had a problem installing the drivers.  So I rebooted the machine and the problem goes away and the trackball works.  I can ALMOST accept that this is the way things are now, because its a “new” device. So guess that happens when I plugged the old mouse back in? Yep, it doesn’t work unless you also reboot the machine.

So mouse hotswap is just broken in Windows 7.

p.s. I’ve tried this on two different computers with different versions of WIN7, same exact problem on both machines.