Had some strange happenings...

.. on my computer this morning.

I was working away when I needed to format a floppy disk. I use this
once in a while. I placed the disk in the drive and I was asked if I
wanted to format the disk. Clicked ok.

Then my mouse pointer went walk about, moving to the top left corner of
the screen, then my start menu opened, at this point I grabbed the mouse
and wrestled control back. I opened my firewall to view my activity log
to see if there was anything obvious, there was nothing. I use Zone
Alarm Pro (paid for) and the firewall log, which is activated from a
drop down box changed back to the anti-spyware option in the drop down.
Since I installed my router Zone Alarm has gone quiet on the incoming
stuff which is to be expected.

Again my start menu opened then closed.

Ok so now I'm paranoid so I've done a full scan with AdAware and Spybot
and found nothing save a couple of tracking cookies. They would have
been from this morning's activity as I clean them out daily.
Zone Alarm scans my PC for SpyWare daily as does Windows Defender.

This has happened previously but I put it down to a conflict between my
Pen Tablet and the mouse that time.

Ali...

Could it be the pen tablet (or its driver) this time?

I've rebooted in the mean time and there is no more activity.

Are there any other conspiracy theories out there?

Aries...

what kind of mouse were you using? I find something similar happens with
my laptop mouse (flatbed, no ball) when it isn't on a really flat surface.

=?iso-8859-1?Q?=A7ire=DFird?= & $ir Vivor...

If it's a tail-less rodent then sometimes signals from elsewhere seem
to be able to affect it so it suddenly disappears and reappears on
another part of the monitor.

mothy...

It's a Logitech Optical Mouse. It's usually perfectly well behaved but I
did have a fight to wrestle back control to make the pointer go where I
wanted.

Aries...

perhaps it needs a new battery or a good clean ?

mothy...

Val, it doesn't require batteries and there is nothing to clean, 'cept
it's bottom, there are no moving parts.
I've just re-installed the driver for it, put a bit of chocolate and a
few raisins in bowl next to its mat. It's sitting there quite happily
and so am I 'cos we're sharing the chocolates. :-)

Aries...

LOL, sounds like the chocolate did the trick - one happy little mousey ;)

noreen...

Any excuse ;-))))

mothy...

Anti panic measures always include chocolate. Sometimes I miss out the
panic bit and go straight for the chocolate. ;-)

Pingu...

I get similar things happening. The cure always seems to be using adaware
and removing low risk traking softwere.

Hawkeye23...

I had a similar experience several weeks ago.
I use Forte Free Agent as my newsreader and was reading Silversurfers
as you do.
Out of the blue appeared on the screen an unusual shaped cursor and
pointer - both black as I recall.The cursor was a big black diamond
with an approx 1/4in line sticking out of each corner.
This then set off scrolling of its own accord including moving right
over to the right so the message disappeared off to the left.
Like the OP I was in a bit of a panic that I was being invaded by
something nasty and quickly closed free Agent and shut down the PC.
On restart I ran every nasty catcher I have -
AVG/ZA/Spybot/Adaware/Stinger - but found nothing untoward.
And it has never recurred.
Does anyone recognise those symptoms and in particular the big black
pointer and diamond shaped cursor.

mothy...

Hawkeye, do you have a clickable wheeled mouse. If you depress the wheel
a cursor can appear on screen similar to your description which will
allow you to scroll around the window with mouse movements alone.
clicking again removes the feature.