My mom's Toshiba laptop is experiencing a weird problem. She has an external USB mouse that will work for a few minutes, then goes dead. Even while it's working, it will jump around a little erratically. I had her replace it, but 2 new ones have behaved the same way. They've all been optical, and after the few minutes, the laser goes dead. If she turns it off or closes the lid to hibernate it, it will work again for a few minutes when it comes back on. The laptop's touchpad works fine.

It smells to me like something wrong with the USB ports themselves, but I'm weak on the hardware side of things (I also had her try different ports on the laptop). Anybody have any thoughts before I have her bring it somewhere? She's in a different city, so I don't have immediate access to it. I did see it doing this during a visit, so I know it's not her imagination.

Sounds like a hardware usb problem to me.
make sure the bios on the MB is up to date, flash it if you have too. USB 2 is another thing u might wanna check to make sure its current..

i know here at work i was having a problem with a laptop and getting read errors from the usb ports. Sadly i had to replace the MB on it to fix it! oh well works great now.