Solved Can a virus enter a USB-transceiver?

[Admiral Awesome]

Yeah, yeah - I know; that would border on witchcraft and I'm almost embarrassed to post the question but...can a virus enter and somehow 'survive' in a sometimes-used USB-transceiver or the hardware it communicates with?

I would not pose this question but for two things. 1) I have, like most, been infected a few times and then by nasty trojans and I recognize the consequent behavior of my PC and 2) yesterday was the 2'nd time the PC went haywire in the same way upon my plugging in said transceiver.

The dongle is for a wireless mouse which I use occasionally when watching movies on the PC. The first 3-4 months it worked OK, but the last two times I plugged in the thing this happened: the mouse pointer would move in jerky motions and 'lag behind' the mouse movements; the HDD LED went on and stayed lit continuously - the PC seemed 'otherwise engaged' - and pretty soon Windows started generating 'The Memory is running out - close one or more applications' - error messages galore even though the KMplayer was the only non-system app running and there are 8 GB's of RAM.

Then things would really start getting out of hand to the point where I had to forcibly shut down the system and on restart enter Protected Mode so as to restore to an earlier date. When that process ended and the machine restarted the problem was gone. Needless to say I had unplugged the USB dongle long before.

Why might this be? I'm reluctant, mildly put, to continue experimenting before hearing from you good folks.

Thank you.

 

[Golden]

Sounds more like a driver problem/hardware conflict to me. Are you using the latest device driver?

 

[Admiral Awesome]

Thanks for answering Golden. I hadn't thought of that since windows installs a generic driver automatically (none was supplied with the mouse/transceiver) and also because things had worked fine from the get-go.
If I were to search, in Device Manager, for an updated driver it is my experience that a) it doesn't find one - the one you have is just the ticket and b) I would be back to square one next time I plugged the thing in, n'est ce pas?

 

[strollin]

I doubt a virus could be present but about a year ago it was discovered that wireless keyboard/mouse dongles were trivial to hack and a hacker could gain access to your computer very easily. The only problem was that the hacker had to be within 100 yards or so from your computer. Read about it here: https://wccftech.com/heres-computer-hacked-wireless-keyboard-mouse/