Windows detects USB GPS as Serial Ballpoint - please suggest permanent modification to prevent any serial mouse detection

Per all of you who are having trouble with this in XP, open up the boot.ini in c:\ and add  /NoSerialMouse right after (no space) the /fastdetect command.  This should do it.  It is a huge nuisance but solvable.

Still waiting too, in my case its for the "real" RS232 com ports.

I am on a sail boat, USB-stuff is ok as these have their own drivers, but dataflow (NMEA0183) is a plain text string, endless.

I use a software multiplexer and everything went fine for years after disabling serial mouse checking in XPpro, until I installed windows7.

On the com ports are: com1=ICOM Radio, com2=Airmar weather sensor PB200, com3=Raymarine AIS500, COM4=Raymarine Autopilot. Soon there will be 2 more serial ports for weather fax demodulator and another ICOM SSB Radio

Can it be rally true that a problem solved ages ago for win98, winME, winXP now pops up in win7 again and is UNSOLVEABLE????

I do not seem to be the only one who does not find a maybe obious solution, but why the heck is there no help from the company that had no problems asking for my money? A little customer service would help a lot, gain more goodwill on customer side  than Mr. Gates money for welfare.

It only needs that command line again to stop windows installing an obsolete serial ballmouse whenever there is any data flow at a serial port.

Yes, starting windows first and then switching on other devices helps. But, bad habit, from time to time windows thinks it must check ports again and in middle of nowhere, usually at inconvenient times, it installs it again. Not funny to switch off all navigation electronics in the middle of the night in close quarters and make a reboot. Btw. in those cases shut down takes a long time too, only work around: the old electric off-switch. Welcome in the 21 century

Well i havent found a reliable solution in the couple of months. Sadly microsoft's idea of "is there data over the serial port? must me a mouse." means i'll likely buy a new gps, or get linux up and running as my in vehicle system...but that has bad support for my wlan/bluetooth combo :) either way it's probably worth buying a new piece of hardware. Thanks Mark and microsoft for not responding to the thread :P

Hi Gellenb. I am working on this problem with a GPS device from Holux (m215) right now. My coworker solved it on XP by running the command "DEVCON.exe DISABLE *PNP0F09"

It seems to work on W7 as well. You may try this solution by getting hold of DEVCON.EXE: It is included in the Windows DDK (Driver Development Kit 7.1). Or you may download it from here, I believe: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272

EDIT: Seems like it works, but it has to be done for each separate USB port you will be using. I am working on trying to find a solution to this...

After all these years, I can't believe that no one at Microsoft has resolved this.  The answer under NT4 was add /noserialmice to the boot.ini.  Under XP it was changed to /fastdetect:port#.  Here today I worked for three hours trying to figure out why I could not get the USB/Serial adapters to work.  I had remembered years ago there was a problem.  Sure enough when I went looking for the no serial mice there it was.  I went into the Device Manager showing that Windows 7 x64 installed the Microsoft BallPoint mouse into the system on those com's.   I uninstall them, and Windows just puts them right back again after a reboot!  If there isn't anyone at Microsoft old enough to know what a BallPoint mouse is, go looking on the internet.  They are only technology from 15-20 years ago!  Surely there still has to someone has been working for Microsoft since the late 80's early 90's that know what they are, and what needs to be done to resolve this, even if it happens to be another bandaid like the editing of the boot.ini file from Windows NT 4 and XP.