rude

Hi, I realise there is a mandrake forum but sometimes you can never get enough information... Firstly I have a micro$oft wheel mouse which works great until I decide to re-log in, where it stops working and will not work again until I reboot. Also I have a speedtouch frog like modem which also works great but when I reboot my computer it tries to close the connection to the internet comes back and tells me that it can't but shuts down the usb ports. Fine except when i reboot my usb port is inactive an I cant select linux from the bootloader with my usb keyboard and loads up windoze instead!! (which starts the usb back up and everything is fine). It does not need to reboot, it can happen when I stop the connection in linux and it tells me something else has control of my modem. Any help would be useful. thx.

i am also a newbie with a gforce 4 card but it was my understanding that my mandrake 9.0 was already using nvidia drivers after installing it... should I have a go at installing anyway as i dont get the nvidia splash screen?