Hello fpflug, you are quite lucky, if an unplug-replug-cycle does for you.
In this respect I don't believe my problem is identical.
However, changing mouse setups does not help me either. The problem still persists, while kernel, xorg, KDE versions and so on have been changing several times.

Lately the pointer froze three times a day - and there is no remedy exept waiting for some minutes until hours or rebooting the whole thing.

It's an endless story.

As I have sadly recognized that there seems to be no way to eliminate the problem nor to quickly reinitialize the lost pointer, I try to manage everything by keyboard shortcuts whenever the pointer has vanished for a time.
OK, so there is Alt & F3 (default setting in KDE) to get a "window actions" menu, from which one can choose a "move window" item. Subsequently the active window can be moved by the four arrow keys, as expected.

Unfortunately, this feature does not work as soon as the pointer is gone! (When moving this way, the pointer symbol changes to a four-angled icon, and this is where it seems to fail: a missing object cannot change it's icon.)


As a small comfort, I found out it's at least possible to use the 4 options to align a window with the upper, lower, left or right screen edge. By this workaround it is possible to regain a window that has partially been moved outside the screen area before (when the mouse worked).


Maybe these further details enlighten someone where things get broken. Unfortunately, they still do about 1-2 times a day for about half an hour.

Try another distro, like Knoppix, or something, temporarily.

IF it still happens, when EVERYTHING is different, software-wise, then it's a hardware-vs-linux/X problem, not a distro-specific problem.

I'm thinking it's X, though, that's deranged.

Just a note and probably not worth spending much time looking into, the 'i810' xorg driver has caused lockups for me. Switched to the 'intel' driver now and all is good.
cheers

I've had my mouse pointer freeze up on me, pretty much in the same way as described here.

After fiddling around with xorg.conf, drivers etc. - unsuccessfully - I finally realized that all that was needed for my (duh!) wireless mouse were new batteries!

That's quite funny :o) - However, the problem above occurred with different types and models of wired mice - and still persists.

For the twenty, thirty (or so) minutes the pointer vanishes, you are compelled to do everything by keyboard.

(1) Unfortunately, some of those alternatives (in particular moving or resizing a window by keyboard after pressing Alt&F3), do not work either then!
(2) And, if you happen to press Ctrl&Alt&Del, the "end session for $USER"-Dialog is shown and X gets stuck, rendering the PC useless for the quite long period until magically the pointer gets restored.
(3) The Desktop stayes grayed, and this dialog cannot be aborted by pressing ESC, as it normally can!

These stunning details (1)-(3) might be a hint to judge what exactly goes wrong, and all I hope(d) for was a way to trigger the unknown event for this "sponaneous restauration" a little bit earlier, just when needed.

I have experienced this problem occasionally.

Problem always goes away when I restart the hotplug service. This causes re-detection of all devices connected on the USB bus and re-initialization of all drivers.

In my mandriva distro, this is accomplished by (as root) issuing this command: service hotplug restart.

If the service command is not available, the hotplug control script will normally be found in you initscripts directory, which is someplace under /etc in all distros with which I am familiar. Commonly the directory is named init or init.d. In Fedora and in Mandriva it is /etc/rc.d/init.d. In Ubuntu it is (IIRC) /etc/init.

I issue this command from an xterm if one is conveniently available, otherwise I do a ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a console where I can log in.

FInally found the cause!
 

Commit Log for Fri Feb 29 10:57:56 2008
The follwing packages were removed:
kscreensaver-xsavers
libxss-dev
x11proto-scrnsaver-dev
xscreensaver

Since then (10 weeks ago), the pointer arrow has never left again!
So if you share the trouble described above, you might want to check the screensaver(s) installed on your box.

I also have the above mentioned symptoms. After a couple of hours of active X window usage, the pointer gets stuck at the upper left corner of the virtual desktop. I'm using Gentoo and running gnome desktop with gdm on a ThinkPad R50e. Switching virtual screens, disconnecting the wired mouse or the acecad tablet couldn't solve the problem. Only restarting X window helps. At least I have to log out and log in again. It also happens if I use only the trackpoint device (there's no touchpad on my laptop). I thought that newer versions of X, or gdm, or xlib, or some *proto will solve the problem, but it disturbs me for several months now. It happens randomly. I can't isolate a specific triggering event. The RAM modules, my HDD, and the replaced motherboard of the computer are working well. There's nothing useful appeared in the logs.

The initial question remains:
How can I manually force the pointer device to reset itself (using kernel version 2.6.24-hardened-r2)? Something like echo-ing "reset" into a special file or something.

The code mentioned on the link found at the fifth reply of this topic has been reported to be merged. However some symptoms still remained.

I haven't tried to restart gpm. I don't know how to restart the event system or the hid system. The trackpoint isn't even a USB device, and it can trigger this on its own.

Regards,
Dw.