MacOS – User Control screwed up but unable to click on icons with Mouse on OSX 10.8

mac-appstoremacosmouseui

I dont know what has happened, but today user control with mouse and trackpad on my macbookpro is screwed up.

I rebooted twice, it made no difference.

The trackpad moves the cursor okay, but I cannot get tapping or clicking the trackpad have any effect.

With my mouse I can access menubars, but the left and right buttons are swapped round. I then went to the System Preferences screen to try and fix the mouse preferences, but clicking on any icon with left or right button has no effect.

I then found no icons of that type seem to work, I thought Id try and just update OSX with any updates available hoping that would fix anything that has got corrupted. But although I can get to the Appstore Update screen and there are two updates available I cannot get the updates installed. Clicking with the left button does nothing, clicking with right button changes the colour of the button slightly so the bottom half is in gray but nothing else happens.

As there is no menu option to install the updates I thought I tried and install the updates using the keybaord but I cannot work out how to do this.

Help Please !

Best Answer

I'm not sure about the answer, but my suggestions are too long for a comment. So I will create an answer nontheless.

First: Installing updates with the keyboard should be easy if you are able to launch the app store. When you are in the appstore, use your "tab"-key to go through the main menu. Hit "space" to enter the selected item. Hitting the tab key again will bring you to the other items in the window (like the "update"-button).

If updating does not solve your issue and you are sure that there is no Magic Mouse somewhere in your bag or whatever, which is accidently turned on and can cause issues, you could try to reset NVRAM. This article should be interesting to you: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4061591?start=0&tstart=0