I've compiled my own 2.6.9 kernel yesterday and, apart from sound and graphics problems (I was expecting that), my mouse has been having a strange behavior.

My pointer won't be moving first, then it works. Slowly, but working , but then after a few seconds I'll lose an axis (meaning it won't go up or down or left and right) and then some random things happen like, say, my KDE bar minimizes or some icon on my desktop gets clicked, etc.

I'm using a simple Logitech PS/2 optical mouse which never caused me any problems at all under previous Slack installs or other distros.

This sounds like some sort of change in using gpm, or a wrong protocol support in X. I doubt it's kernel related. What kind of mouse do you have, and are you using gpm?

It's a Logitech USB optical mouse, with a PS/2 adapter.

I don't know if I'm using gpm... standard Slackware install. Is it a kernel module ? As for X, I don't think it's the problem : I set the mouse protocol to "auto".

GPM is a program that allows for mouse use in the console. It can repeat data on /dev/gpmdata. try ps aux | grep gpm to see if it is running.

Here's my ps -aux | grep gpm

I would configure gpm to perform "raw" repeating on /dev/gpmdata and change you X config to read from /dev/gpmdata (not /dev/psaux) and see if the problem persists.

And how do you do that ? I suppose that gpm's config file is hidden somewhere but...

Still, I changed my xorg.conf file to use /dev/gpmdata instead of /dev/psaux and X would not start. Maybe the above config would solve it... I dunno.

Maybe you left some ps2 support out in the compile?

Find the gpm conf file. Probably /etc/gpm.conf, /etc/conf.d/gpm, or something similar. Set it up such that -Rraw is appended to the command line.