Keyboard/mouse not working in windows

[MattyI]

I got a problem.

I sat down to do some work last night on my XP home machine and as I started using my computer the mouse stopped working. The last thing I did before the failure was hit Ctl-N in IE from a hotmail screen. I used my keyboard to reboot, and when it came back up I had keyboard control for all of 5 seconds, and still no mouse. Now they're both not working.

I turned off the computer, then powered on, and was able to use F5 to get to the boot menu, so I figured it was only a windows problem. From there I booted into safe mode, but the mouse/keyboard still didn't work. I tried several options from the boot menu, including using settings from the last successful boot, but that didn't work either.

Here's the odd thing: I tried booting from CD, but my computer wasn't set to look at the CD drive before booting the hard disk. I hit F2 during boot to access the BIOS menu to change that feature. The computer recognized the F2, but once I was in the BIOS menu the keyboard didn't respond (my bios screen doesn't use the mouse).

What do I do next? Create an emergency boot floppy and try to boot to DOS to retrieve essential files? Reformat? Throw it out the window? The only thing I haven't tried is putting the mouse in a USB slot, but I have no idea if that will work given the symptoms. Additionally, I haven't changed any mouse or keyboard settings recently.


Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.


-MattyI