Compaq Armada 7370DMT laptop with 96 megabytes of RAM. Red Hat Linux 7.0, with all errata updates applied. Using blackbox as window manager, and xdm for graphical logins. I have disabled the laptop's built-in PS/2 pointing device in the CMOS setup. I use an external serial mouse. At the xdm login screen the external serial mouse does not work. If I unplug the external serial mouse, and plug it back in, the mouse functions properly.
Same situation occurs in console with gpm: upon successful loading of gpm, mouse is not recognized. Unplug the serial mouse, plug it immediately back in, and the mouse is recognized. Further, if the above process is performed prior to X loading, X will then recognize the mouse. Additional notes: I am using a Microsoft serial scroll mouse.
Since this problem is occuring in gpm AND in XFree86, it almost certainly is not a bug I am betting. Most likely you have a misconfigured mouse in both gpm and XFree86. Run mouseconfig and try different drivers until you find one that works. If this doesn't happen, try playing changing the mouse configuration by hand by editing your XF86Config-4 file and tweaking the mouse driver config line by hand. To find out a complete list of mouse drivers, view the XFree86 mouse manpage: man -a mouse