NIC conflict is affecting Photoshop

[medoomi]

I noticed a couple weeks ago that my mouse/pointer was moving erattically in photoshop. Upon a left mouse click, whatever tool I was using would jump where it should not be (eg the move tool would displace a layer after a left click, or the brush tool would add a swipe of color where it shouldn't be, or the marquee tool, refusing to de-select because it would add a new selection at a new mouse click)--and this has been causing massive frustrations to say the least.

I'm on a Windows 7 64-bit install, Quad core, 2.8Ghz, 8Gig RAM system.

After chasing the problem for a few days, it appears to be caused by a PCI network interface card. If I remove the card, the behavior goes away... But if I only disable the card in devices, the problem persists. I've tried updating the drivers, but this doesn't help. The problem card is a Rosewell, which uses a RTL8100C chipset. I tried a Belkin PCI NIC to see if that would help (chipset 8139a), but it causes the same erattic behavior.

So, I'm looking at a system problem (not a photoshop problem), maybe a hardware conflict. Photoshop is the only program in which I've noticed the behavior.

I don't imagine Adobe will provide much support to solve it, so I'm open to suggestions.

My first step has been ordering an Intel PCI-express card, which uses an Intel 82574L chipset (rather than Realtek). I don't know if this is going to help at all.

Any ideas how to solve this?

 

[medoomi]

OK... so some back-pedaling is in order.

I tried removing the PCI network card today, and the problem of the jumping pointer persists... I was fairly sure that the removal of the card solved the issue, however, I'll roll back the OS disk image to the point where I tested it, and confirm in the next few days.

If I am correct and the problem was seemingly solved by the removal of the PCI card... and then came back, do you know where I can start looking for the culprit?

Looks like the haystack just got bigger & the needle, further away...

 

[medoomi]

Finally: SOLVED!

My system must have been slightly unstable. After hearing the occasional pop on my external sound card, I realised there might be some stability issues involved. Last time this happened on my system, I had to raise the RAM timings a little, so I tried that again, as well as some other voltage/timing tweaks in BIOS, & the pops have gone... and photoshop is behaving perfectly again (yay!)