Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000

I don't know if this is the correct forum here for this, but I'll give it a shot anyhow.

Recently I bought a Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 for use with my PC games. Since I'm left-handed the ambidexterous nature of this mouse made it mine, as the side-buttons on the Razer Diamondback/Copperhead felt awkward in my hand, whereas the ones on this one did not.

Now, enter my problem. It worked fine for a while, but until recently the mousewheel has been misbehaving. It's not so much that it doesn't work, it just doesn't work accurately. See, if i rotate the wheel too slow, it doesn't register that it's being rotated.

I can move it one detent (those clicks you can feel in it as you rotate it) downward to move a piece on a webpage or to change a weapon in a game, but if i do it too slowly it doesn't register as having happened.

In the same way, if I rotate it one click at a time and if i do it too slowly, i can rotate the entire wheel 360 degrees around it's axis without it having registered anything.

I thought at first that this was a sensitivity issue, but all the playing around in the world with it's augmented software (in the Mouse icon in the Control Panel) won't fix it. This software came off of the disk that shipped with the mouse.

It also keeps a squatter process in my Ctrl-Alt-Del processes manager, by the name of point32.exe.

Killing the process does not stop this behavior, although I could have sworn I did it before and it stopped misbehaving.

What can you guys suggest to me upon this subject? Uninstall it's driver software? Get new software off of Microsoft's webpage?

Do you think it's hardware related or software related?

I think it's been a bit longer than 30 days since I bought it, so I don't think an exchange is possible.

Any ideas?