Mouseclick & [enter] not recognized from login screen, more weirdness

When I went to login to my computer tonight, I could move the pointer around with the mouse, and I could enter my password. But when I hit [enter] to log in, it wasn't recognized. Nor was clicking the mouse on the area to the right of my password.

I tried clicking on the part in the bottom right of the screen where I could shut down or restart, and that didn't work either. So I pressed the restart button on the case.

Things went normally from there, but during the bios part, I saw something on the black screen that looked like it was saying "loading firmware" (something I don't usually see) and the numbers increased rapidly up to around 75% and then the computer seemingly restarted itself.

This time I got a message saying that Windows didn't shut down normally last time (presumably the time I forced a restart) and how would I like to proceed. I picked "normal startup" and everything went fine, I logged in, and the computer appears to be running fine now.

The event viewer shows nothing too alarming. A mention that "the previous system shutdown" from last night was "unexpected" - but I think the way the event viewer works, and the way things are logged, that was referring to my force restart tonight. I have Avast antivirus run overnight, and it ran successfully completion between the time I restarted last night and tried to log in today.

Has anyone ever seen something like this happen? The two oddities here are the failure to recognize the enter key and the mouseclicking from the login screen, then that "loading firmware" (or whatever it said) and restart during the boot sequence.

I practice very safe computing usage and have never had a malware problem, ever, on a work or home computer, and I don't think that's the case now. And my Windows 7 is up to date; as of this moment (evening of March 1) the last updates were KB915597 definition updates for Windows Defender, applied on the 17th, 21st, 24th, and 28th of December.

Britton30 said:

Not sure about the click issue, but could you have had a Windows update that needed a shut down to install? It could be that's what you saw.

That's something I considered, but:

• As mentioned in the original post, no new Windows updates have been applied; last four were Windows Defender definition updates
• Windows update restarts that I've seen come from a blue screen after Windows has been started. This came from the black bios screen before "starting Windows" had shown up.