Good news – Windows Vista Update now has the fixed HID drivers to download as an optional update. The old HID drivers were the cause of many OS problems with various versions of the Microsoft Wireless Mice. Problems included the inability to get into Sleep mode and more acutely problems with various applications that relied on system idle states that would just never come. This was also the cause for the various Intellisense issues I’ve been complainging about in Visual Studio 2005 and Web applications where Intellisense on the generated classes would simply not show up until I explicitly went into design mode.

With the help of the Visual Studio Web Tools team I was eventually able – after a few false starts - to pin the problem on the HID driver, and yesterday I got a note that a patch for new HID drivers was just released.

Installed the new drivers yesterday and all is well even with the HID drivers enabled. This is a relief – I had been running for about a month with the HID drivers off and while it worked there were some mouse inconsistencies with my wireless laser mouse – pointing inaccuracies and stuttering and issues with certain applications not properly seeing the mouse wheel actions.