Mouse customizations not working after standby

I was using Logitech marble mouse(trackball mouse) for a quite some time. BTW, it is a very nice alternative for the regular mouse especially for people who get pain in the wrist. I closed down on this item mainly because of its cost effectiveness and good set of features. First of all its ergonomic. It fits well for both left-handed and right-handed people. In general, trackball mouses causes less strain on the muscles because you need not hold the mouse and move it. It stays in a place and we only have to move the ball on top with our fingers. I read on the internet that gripping the mouse contributes to most of the strain caused by mouse usage. Though its very less strain to do it once, we catch the mouse a few hundred times in a day and it causes RSI(Repetetive Stress Injury). I used to get pain in my wrist earlier because of my typing and mouse usage. Now, my pain reduced a lot after using this trackball and a softkey keyboard.

Coming back to the main topic of my post, recently, I started getting one strange problem with my mouse. I customized the mouse buttons to do page up and page down when I press the small buttons on the mouse. (By default they are assigned to previous and next for the browser). When I boot my machine from scratch I do not have any problem and my customizations work fine. There is a mouse icon in the system tray which can be used to customize the button assignments. The problem starts when I put the machine and standby mode and come out of it. The mouse icon in the system tray is missing and my customizations do not work any more. Everything goes to default. Rebooting the system is not an acceptable solution for me.

Finally, I found a solution to the problem where I need not reboot the machine. The trick is to get back the mouse icon in the system tray, i.e. get back the necessary daemon/service working. From the list of applications that run during the startup, I figured that LOGI_MWX.EXE is the one that corresponds to the mouse service. It is located in c:\windows\logi_mwx.exe. The solution is to run this application after coming out of standby mode. You will get back your customizations. You can create a shortcut to this application on the desktop for easy access.

Logitech quick cam messenger works with old drivers

I had problems getting my logitech quickcam messeger webcam to work. I tried installing the latest drivers meant for this webcam i.e., quickcam v11.5. I did not have the original driver CD that I got with my webcam. So, I downloaded the latest drivers from logitech webpage. I have windows XP with service pack 2. After installing the drivers the installer asks to connect the usb of the webcam. But the webcam is not detected. Disconnecting and reconnecting, or rebooting and rebooting and rebooting also did not help.

When I googled for it, I found that many people faced this problem. But most of the discussions ended without any solution. Some solutions suggested to replace some set of files in the drivers which did not work for me. Even manually picking the .inf files also did not help me in getting the webcam to work.

Finally, in one post which was giving a workaround for similar problem in windows vista, I found a link to the old drivers (quickcam v8.4.8). That did the magic for me. Before installing the old drivers, I had to clean up the old mess that I left around. I uninstalled logitech usb webcam hardware through the device manager. And I uninstalled the driver pack and the logitech application software via the add/remove programs.

After cleaning up all the mess, I installed the 8.4.8 package. It asked me to reboot the PC. After rebooting, the installation software asked me to plug in the usb of the webcam. There was a big pause and I was holding my breath. Finally, the webcam is detected thus ending the week long battle. Once the webcam is detected everything became a piece of cake!