Ghost Printer Stops Mouse In Movement

So today I came across an unusual problem.  Probably very rare as I was unable to find any useful forum posts.  Basically, a customer reported to me that when they print [to a shared printer] the mouse stops moving until the printer is done.  My first thought was that the spooler service must be causing user input to freeze/hang.I first looked into my spooler suspicion.  The keyboard was unaffected when the printer was active, however, the mouse locked up pretty much from the time paper was pulled into the printer until the printer shot the paper out.  The mouse was wireless/USB.  The computer was sitting side by side to the printer.  The printer was hooked up with a USB cable to computer B and was shared over the network to aforementioned computer.

I hooked up a USB mouse just to rule out another piece of the mystery.  Not to my surprise, the USB mouse was unaffected while the wireless mouse froze.  What was really fishy was that even if I printed from computer B [the host computer] the mouse on computer A would still lock up.  This lead me to believe that the problem was obviously coming from the printer itself.  My assumption was that some electrical noise was coming from the printer and the USB mouse receiver was getting interference and causing the mouse to be useless.  I plugged the receiver in to a back USB port putting it at least a foot away from (rather than 1 inch) the side of the printer and this resolved the problem permanently.

Just thought I’d share this likely rare occurrence with other techs.  Anyone with a similar experience or a technical explanation feel free to comment.  Thanks for reading.

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