I have been suffering for quite a few days now with a mysterious mouse lag that I couldn’t trace. dmesg showed no errors, and even piping X output into a text file told me nothing I could decipher.

It’s worth mentioning that I’m using an HP MO42KOA optical USB mouse with a USB-to-PS/2 adapter on a Dell Latitude CPx J750GT laptop. However, I have switched it out for other optical mice using the same connector, and seen the same lag.

I even rebuilt this machine with Arch Linux and saw the lag disappear. Putting Ubuntu back on brought the little bugger back. Grr. 😦

I finally found (I think) a solution in this thread. I added noapic acpi=noirq apm=on to my defoptions in my Grub boot menu.lst, and ran a sudo update-grub. The lag seems to have dissipated — but my fingers are still crossed.

Edit: Well, that kind of did the trick, and kind of didn’t. The mouse lag reappeared after about 2 hours of uptime, this time with a barrage of “printk: xx messages suppressed” and “eth0: Information frame lost” messages in /var/log/kernel.log. I can’t find anything definitive on that.

So I’ve tried a couple of other things. First, I’ve noticed that starting xfce4-terminal gives me a brief message in the X error channel that says something about dbus having message problems. So I’ve taken to starting dbus-launch, to see if that helps at all.

Also, and I have no idea how I came across this, I installed inetutils-syslogd, which tore out klogd and syslogd (I think), but now the lag seems to have dissipated. Of course, my uptime is only 40 minutes as I’m typing this, so I’ll see if it really helps at all. Fingers, for the record, are still crossed.