After the left button began to fail on the Wingman Gaming Mouse I purchased just over a year ago I decided to go back to using the MouseMan Sensa serial mouse I bought in 1995 when I built my first PC. The MouseMan still works great (despite years of abuse) and says Made in Ireland on the bottom while the Wingman says Made in China (make of this what you will).
At any rate, I ended up spending an entire day on the phone with Logitech support (long distance) trying to get the old mouse fully operational under Windows 98se. It had been working flawlessly on my linux machine and Microsoft's basic mouse driver detected it (but did not support the crucial third button).
After this lengthy period of scripted troubleshooting and being disconnected repeatedly it was discovered that the problem was due to a previously unknown bug in Logitech's MouseWare. As a result the Sensa will go undetected by MouseWare unless I leave the Wingman plugged into the PS/2 port.
Overall I probably spent as much on long distance phone calls as I would have on a new mouse. Why did I do it? I like the design of the Sensa that much. It fits my hand perfectly (most mice these days are too narrow), has some heft to it (but isn't too heavy) and impresses people at LAN parties with it's exotic charcoal colored, slightly shiny/soft covering.
It turns out that the issue only manifested itself with my old motherboard (an
ABIT BH6). I'm still sure it's a MouseWare bug, it just doesn't apply to my new
KR7A.