Keyboards, Mice, Screensavers: Who knew they were related?

My screensaver recently stopped working. This has happened before. Usually I just go in to the display properties dialog and change the delay time, hit apply, and voila. Not this time. And what was even stranger was that not only was the screen saver not working but power management seemed to be not functioning as well. After several reboots and "re-applications" of both the screensaver and power management dialogs, I came to the inevitable conclusion: it was time to go to Google and start searching. My initial search of "reset screensaver windows xp" yielded no useful results, so I changed it to "screensaver windows xp not working." This worked a little better, but often times with these technical issues it is better to search Google groups rather than using the general Google search. So...off to the groups I went. I went through a couple of pages of results, clicking on a few, but none were satisfactory. Finally I got to a post that really piqued my interest: someone's screensaver was not working and they had must installed a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. Looking down, I noticed that my mouse was a Wireless Laser Mouse 6000.

It seemed that my shiny new Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 keyboard/mouse combo could be the answer to - or rather the cause of - my problem. Apparently something in the new wireless products from Microsoft (not sure if it is the keyboard/mouse itself or the IntelliType/IntelliPoint) conflict with certain components that load automatically on Windows XP SP2 Media Center Edition 2005 systems, specifically ehtray.exe and DVDLauncher.exe, part of PowerDVD. Disabling these two apps from the process manager (and removing them from the startup routine using msconfig) seems to have reinstated my screensaver to its former glory.

Seems like a lot to up with just for a new keyboard and mouse. But trust me, the laser mouse is worth it. It's like buttah!