I can't figure out how to get this mouse to work with mandrake 9. Its a USB mouse and all of my other mice work, but this one has mixed up command signals or something

The mouse moves up and down, although its inverted. The mouse only moves right when I click a button and it does not move left. The buttons seem to work sporadically.

Does anyone have a diagnosis for this?

Also I have another problem as well.

When I boot linux and then reboot to windows my clock is always many hours off in windows. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Have you set mouse protocol to imps/2?

I don't know where you live, but the time-difference may be that Linux uses UTC and Windows local time. You should set Linux to use local time as well.

How would I do both of those things?

I'm just getting started with linux and I have a lot of trouble just getting around

command lines would be easiest because thats the most native environment for me

Command line - now that's a good start!
Have you gotten used to any text editor? You may be aware of the eternal war between vi and emacs adepts. I never got used to either of them. I need something easy and simple like nano. But Mandrake doesn't supply that. Maybe they have pico, but I seem to remember it has neither.
Anyway, for the mouse thing check /etc/X11/XF86Config - it's rather long, but it should have a section on the mouse. See what it says there. I also suggest you do a Google search on your mouse, it could be something completely different.

/etc/localtime should be a link to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam (in my case, you may live somewhere else) which you can check with ls -l /etc/localtime
I also have a line in /etc/rc.conf that says CLOCK="local" but Mandrake may do things differently (check the Mandrake Control Center in GUI). It seems in Mandrake you need to have /etc/sysconfig/clock to say UTC=false. This you can check with cat /etc/sysconfig/clock. Have a look at http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/utils/utime.html