Feb 142011
I got an email:
have you ever looked into your website carrying some sort of a virus
that replaces your cursor with a circle in which shows up-down and
side-to–side arrows?
I haven’t been able to backtrack it to the “Unwanted Blog” with
certainty yet, but it certainly does seem to show up after I enter your
website.
It’s not something I’ve seen, or even heard of. If anyone else has encountered this, either in association with this website or not, please comment below about what it is and how to get rid of it.
UPDATE: Apparently the cursor looks like this:
17 Responses to “Anyone else have this problem?”
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Not me (on Mac, XP, or Win 7, with Firefox or Chrome).
No problems here.
Not me.
Now, if I click with the mouse wheel, the circle with the two arrows appears. This is a standard Windows item, to fast scroll.
Not here, but as Mr Chung has noted, it does happen normally.
No problems here – using Firefox 3.6.13, with McAfee security running.
No problems, either.
Might it be the user has a mouse with a scroll wheel that is activating, perhaps on your large pictures.
Winchell Chung is right. Escape will cancel it, and until it is cancelled they’ll find that attempting to move the cursor around will scroll the active window up or down or side to side.
You can either reassure them, or explain it is a PEBCAK error depending on how sociable you are feeling.
I agree with Ric, it sounds more like “User Induced Anomaly Syndrome” that is fixed by placing the Oh-En Oh-Eff-Eff in the the Oh-Eff-Eff position and leaving it there. Sorry, my snarky side bristles.
I just tried the scroll button, and that does make the circle with a dot and up-down arrows on it, but the thing I’m running into is larger and has side-to-side arrows on it as well.
It also doesn’t scroll the page.
I sent Scott a jpg of what it looks like.
Any mouse command that creates something like that?
I’ll try the “escape” tactic if it shows up again.
The mouse itself is getting old and fidgety, as am I. 😉
Haha virus mouse pointer… it is the scroll function in the browser. It has only been around 15 years, so I guess few people have ever seen it?
my first scroll mouse had driver for my
Windows 98 PC (way back in history)
that gave same cursor for to scroll on Homepage, PDF etc.
up down and also side ways if the scrollweel is tilt
I’ve got Industrial Strength Symantic Antivirus that I update around once a week. Although you may be right… the mouse itself is old, and may be so old that the virus itself can’t be detected any more.
the Symantic antivirus program can check out anything you want… it never occurred to me to have it check out the mouse itself before, as I thought its tiny memory capacity would be way too small to store a virus…Ill try that. Thanks!
Did you find anything in the mouse, Pat?
I can’t get the odd thing to appear on Scott’s website, but on some others — the ones that are heavy with glitz and flash and the like — it happens often.
The .jpg looks like something that would appear on a flying saucer or on the Ruritanian Air Force. I’ll keep it around for just such an opportunity. Thanks.
Trying to figure out how to just scan the mouse itself looked difficult. Anyway when I do a full computer scan, it should look at that also.
I installed a updated driver for it; I’ll see if that helps.
isn’t that the fast scroll option for newer Logitech mice? comes from the software that can be installed to drive it if you’ve got macro functions not supported by MS.