
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a strange behaviour with Windows 8.1. I have two monitors and whenever I tried to move the mouse between them my mouse pointer got stuck in the middle.
I would have to back up the mouse pointer then move it really quickly to get over the ‘hump’, and reach the next monitor.
Not the charms bar
At first I thought it may be caused by the Windows 8 charms bar. So I switched off the top-right corner navigation under Charms bar > Settings > Change PC settings > PC and devices > Corners and edges.
But it turned out not to be that. The mouse pointer blocking behaviour continued.
Not ModernMix
My attention then turned to ModernMix™, a Windows 8 application from Stardock that allows Modern (Metro) apps to run in a standard window on your desktop.
I had noticed this behaviour only after I had installed ModernMix, so I reasoned that it must have caused it. And sure enough uninstalling ModernMix seemed to stop the behaviour… until I rebooted the PC.
But I didn’t discover this until after I had emailed Stardock support.
Registry hack fixes it
Stardock support were incredibly helpful. The following day I received this reply:
While I can reproduce what you are seeing, I can do so without MM installed. It seems it is a thing with 8.1:
http://winaero.com/blog/fix-mouse-pointer-sticks-on-the-edge-when-moving-between-multiple-monitors/
Please let us know if you should have any further questions/concerns.
And sure enough, the Winaero blog had the solution:
- Open Registry Editor (Ctrl + R, then type: regedit)
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop
- If there is not a DWORD (32-bit) Value called MouseMonitorEscapeSpeed then create one and assign it a value of 1.
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftware \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ ImmersiveShell \ EdgeUI.
- If there is not a DWORD (32-bit) Value called MouseMonitorEscapeSpeed then create one and assign it a value of 1.
- Reboot Windows, or restart the Explorer shell.