Mouse intermittantly freezing

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I've just installed Mint 12 on my laptop and have been having this really annoying intermittant problem with the mouse (or track pad). The curser freezes and the buttons fail to work. The only way out of it that I know of so far is to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and use the arrow keys to get to the log out button. Then I've got to log in as normal again.
I was previously using Mint 9 and this was not an issue on that version. I still have MS Wombat installed and don't experience any problems if I use that either.
There's no set pattern / event / application that might set it off - the mouse just dies on me without warning.
I've seen other mentions on the forums about keyboards going too or even total hardware failures (num-lock etc not working) but it's only the mouse for me in this case that's causing problems.
I've got an ASUS K501N. Plenty of RAM and HDD space etc. It does use Nvidia graphics card and I know that they (drivers) can be problematic from time to time. Not sure how that might relate to the problem but I thought I'd better mention it anyway.
Any suggestions?

I'm having a seperate issue with a flipped image on my webcam in skype that I might post as a seperate issue if I can't get it sorted out but again I thought I'd mention it here just incase there's some strange relation between the two.

Thanks people!

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Update: I've resolved the flipped image issue in Skype so I'm only left with the intermittant mouse issue.

FYI - this was the solution to the Skype issue (I know this could be in a more useful thread for those with Skype issues but just wanna make sure I furnish as much info as I can about my current setup so I can resolve the mouse issue):
1. Edit Skype binary -
sudo gedit /usr/local/bin/skype
2. Add the following lines in the blank text -
#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype
3. Make it executable -
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/skype
4. Start Skype

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Still struggling to figure out the problem with my randomly dying mouse. Everything else on the computer seems to work fine. Has anybody else experienced anything like this?

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I gave up. EIther nobody's interested or I'm the only one with the mouse issue. Either way I've upgraded again to Cinnamon now. I hope that does it.