I shutdown my linux station happily thinking about the new possibilities of firewire, and took off the case cover and gently slid the card into the PCI slot. Upon rebooting i was met with two blank screens, giving me no informations at all. Puzzled i turned of the computer, unplugged the card and rebooted again. I had my display back.. I figured eh I will have to figure this out some other time. Booted back into slackware only to find that my mouse now works in none of the usb ports. Im confused as to what happened, and i am resorting to using links just to get this question out there. Any help greatly appreciated.

Did you remember to use a ground strap to prevent static damage? You can also try to clear the PCI data in the BIOS.

That didn't work but i tried booting into winblows, figuring it's the almighty plug and play point and click OS. Winblows informs me that my device is malfunctioning and to replace it. Sure enough I tried another mouse and it works just fine.. How is it possible that installing a PCI firewire card can just blow a mouse.. I dont understand, help?

Correlation doesn't imply causation. The two events occurred close together in time, but may not be related.

Ah.. tried more things. I tried that mouse on a buddy's computer.. works just fine, the mouse i tried on mine was a ps2 mouse. It seems that none of my usb is working which is what i originally thought. Wierd that its in windows as well. Im confused how it could have caused conflicts given that i didnt even boot into an OS and it still managed to muck something up. I emailed the manufacturer of the firewire card, and hopefully they will shed some light on this situation.