Pluralinput Mouse driver 0.8.6 frequently stops working

Philip Goddard · 27 Oct 2015

I 'upgraded' from Win8.1 to 10 some two weeks ago, and am experiencing an increasingly frequent and disruptive problem, in that my Cirque Smart Cat touchpad stops working, and does not become operational again without a reboot - simply unplugging it and replugging it in (USB) doesn't restore any function.

Until today I'd assumed that the culprit was the Glidepoint driver for the touchpad, and searched for a more recent version, but it turns out that I have the latest version, so no change there. Then I explored more and found in Device Manager, that no fault was shown for the Glidepoint driver when the touchpad stopped working, but a fault was showing for the Pluralinput Mouse 0.8.6 driver. Previously, in Win8 / 8.1, I was aware that the mouse driver was controlling some of the touchpad pointer movements, as well as the Glidepoint driver doing so - which I doubt to be a healthy arrangement.

Fortunately I'd kept a couple of (different) USB mice in reserve, though I wouldn't use a mouse generally nowadays because of the RSI that I was getting from mouse use, and so I tried plugging in one and then the other of those when the touchpad had stopped working. In fact neither mouse would work then - which of course is unsurprising because it was the mouse driver that had fallen over.

The trouble arises particularly when I have cause to do a little plugging in and especially unplugging and then plugging in USB devices (external HDDs). However, it also occurs quite often completely out of the blue while I'm in the middle of working in either Word or BlueGriffon, or indeed doing other things on the desktop. The pointer disappears, and that's it - I have to reboot. Very, very tiresome.

Today, when I'd had this trouble resulting from connecting / disconnecting a succession of HDDs for backup purposes, I checked in Device Manager what the driver problem was purporting to be, and it said (i.e., for Pluralinput Mouse), that the driver had been unable to load because there was already an instance in memory - which to me looks to be rubbish.

Anyway, I could find no more recent version of this driver, and I must say that I'm a bit appalled that Win10 comes out with a v. 0.8 beta mouse driver at all.

So, please, what I want to establish is what alternative driver would be safe to use, because that one is clearly unfit for purpose - and I'm not going without my Smart Cat! I'd most appreciate some properly informed advice on this! -- Many thanks.

Later addition:
Forgot to mention - the driver error reported in Device Manager is given as Code 38, which appears to be fairly notorious, though with no relevant solutions that I could find online. Sweet little M$ Support happily suggests to sufferers from that error that all they need to do is reboot - which is really quite insulting. My problem is that indeed I do have to keep rebooting because of this issue, and b---- well shouldn't have to!

Philip Goddard · 27 Oct 2015

Slightly later note:

Just tried uninstalling the mouse driver. That lost me the pointer for the touchpad, so the mouse driver is definitely required for that. Interestingly, with that driver uninstalled, Device Manager was showing the same error as I'd reported above - that the driver couldn't load because another instance was in memory. It sounds as though that particular error message is being given indiscriminately for occasions when the driver isn't functioning and even isn't present at all! At least the driver automatically reinstalled upon reboot, so I was spared hassle over that - but I still need to find an alternative driver.

Philip Goddard · 29 Oct 2015

Really! Nobody in the Windows 10 Forum has any idea about this one? - Pull the other one, Cedric!

In fact I myself finally solved / fixed this issue last thing yesterday, following yet another failure of that confounded Pluralinput Mouse driver. Further online searching revealed a report by one individual who'd had a non-functioning touchpad (not the same as mine), and his solution had been to go into the Mouse applet in Control Panel (that was pre-Win10), and look at what drivers were available within Windows for his pointing device(s). He found there was an alternative, which he switched to, and that had fixed his problem, with no need to search around online for a recommended alternative.

Although his Windows version and mouse drivers were different, I actually found the same situation: I went to the Mouse applet in Control Panel and found that as well as the default Pluralinput Mouse, also 'HID compatible mouse' was listed. With bated breath I switched to that, and then -

Well, er, then when I set out to challenge it not to do the Pluralinput Mouse's failures, i.e., by plugging in USB HDDs, the mouse driver continued okay but the HDDs failed to mount, and Device Manager showed that for each of those USB HDDs there was a failed Mass Storage Device. - Ouch! And it was with the same error code (38) and message as with the Pluralinput Mouse failures!

I reasoned that as the Pluralinput driver evidently had some sort of untoward functional connection with ALL connected USB devices, probably it was the removal of Pluralinput that had upset the USB driver(s), rather than the use of the HID-Compliant Mouse driver. This was borne out by my regaining proper function of everything once I'd rebooted. Then and again this morning I tried out the various pluggings-in and unpluggings of USB devices that had caused the Pluralinput driver to fall over every time, and had absolutely no glitches this time.

So, shame upon shame on M$ for putting an only partly developed and not properly tested v.0.8 mouse driver into their supposed flagship OS as its default! Whether the at least reasonably stable HID-compliant mouse driver was part of the Win10 installation, or whether it had carried over from my previous Win8.1 setup I have no means of knowing.