>it should be easy to write a serial mouse decoding external,
>and use it with the comport external.
 
Thanks for the insight.  One question though (bear in mind that it may be naive, as I am a week old today in PD):  If I were to write an MS serial mouse external, it would operate most efficiently like this?
 
[comport]---raw serial data--->[ExternalForSerMouse]---X pos | Y pos | Btn1 | Btn 2--->do stuff
 
Thanks,
rs