It's either a bad cable or a marginal USB port (bad solder or contacts). Try it on a different machine, and make sure to wiggle the cable while it's plugged in. If your mouse is optical (most are now), you should be able to see the sensor LED turning on and off.
online since 1993 | huge retrocomputing and TV nerd | lee4hmz.info (under construction) | heapershangout.comI have a wireless USB mouse that keeps disconnecting very briefly or something, because it keeps reading the left button as being released when it's not. So if I try to click and drag, it drops early, and if I just click, sometimes it reads a doubleclick.
Fresh-eyed movie blogI bought my mouse about three years ago. I insisted on it being five-button and having a micro-receiver, and at the time that meant it was $70. These days I see $20 mice meeting those criteria coming through my register all the time.
Fresh-eyed movie blogYup, same deal for me. I bought one of the first Microsoft optical mice, the Explorer. The price gave me my first real big taste of Sticker Shock and it had a cord/mouse body interface failure - read broken cable, but it was brilliant while it lasted.
My current one, the buggy Bluetooth Explorer was a quarter of the cost as far as I recall.
I went looking for a Bluetooth mouse recently, and that was like...you know, I'm not paying $40 for a relatively basic mouse, guys. :P I ended up buying a regular Microsoft wireless mouse with a nano-transceiver at a local computer shop for like $15.
online since 1993 | huge retrocomputing and TV nerd | lee4hmz.info (under construction) | heapershangout.com

Periodically, my USB mouse will "disconnect" for a second (with accompanying sound effect) and then reconnect. There doesn't seem to be any sort of pattern to it happening.
My question is this: Is it just time to get a new mouse, or is there something wrong with a driver or something?