Greetings, sorry if this is a noobish question.
I've install both Puppy ver 2.11 and 2.12, i have this constant problem on my Dell Dimension E512 pc. After bootup and enter the desktop my usb optical mouse can only run for at least 5 minutes before it halt and freeze on the screen. The other devices like keyboard works fine. I had to press F12 to access the terminal to restart Puppy. I've narrow down possiblity of setup error by switching Xvesa and Xorg, modifiying rc.local and added "modprobe usbhid", change the usb bios setup but non-of these solution helps. I google around but the best was adding "modprobe usbhid". For your information i'm using Dell optical mouse with scroll and 2 button. Any assistance and solution would be greatfully appreciated.

I had a similar problem on one of my PCs. After about 10 min my mouse stopped working! In my case my mouse also lost power (the LED turned off) it turned out to be a motherboard problem and I had to replace the motherboard.

If your mouse loses power it might be the same thing. If you use your Linux CD/DVD to recover Linux and the same thing happens durein the recover process it's probably a motherboard problem.

Hope that isn't the case and you have an easier (and cheeper) solution! Good luck.

In my case my optical mouse LED lights still on but the cursor won't move, it just freeze over there and won't move again until the next reboot. I don't think it about the power issue. I still don't have any clue how to make the mouse cursor function permanently. Any solution?

I had this problem in DSL with my usb optical mouse.

Just a shot in the dark...are you plugged directly into one of the USB ports on the computer, or are you using some kind of adapter that allows multiple devices?

I had the same problem with my Logitech optical mouse. The mouse loses power after about 5 minutes of *inactivity*. I am not yet sure what the issue is but I worked around the problem by connecting the optical mouse to a serial port using an adapter.