Center area of the screen doesn't react to mouse events

Question

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad E550 with Windows 8.1 here that shows the following weird behaviour since today:

There is a square/rectangle of about 8-10 cm in the center of the screen that doesn't react to mouse events.

This is independent of:

• the pointer device I use:

  • 2x USB mouse
  • Touchpad
  • Trackpoint

• the program I'm in. It happens in:

  • Firefox: I can't select text fields or buttons that are located in the center of the screen.
  • Control Panel: The background color doesn't change on hovering over items in the center of the screen. I can't select these items with a pointer device either. The items react to pointer events if I drag the whole window to some other place on the screen. Selecting with the keyboard works always.
  • Desktop: I can't drag shortcuts into the mentioned area. ( symbol appears at pointer)

It seems as if there is a completely transparent and hence invisible window sitting on a top z-position in the center of the screen that prevents mouse events reaching the windows behind it.

I tried the following so far:

• I rebooted a few times.
• I ran Windows Update including the latest optional updates which included hardware updates.
• I checked the Event Logs but couldn't detect anything suspicious.
• I performed a virus check that didn't find anything including:
  • boot sectors
  • root kits
  • entire drive

This is not my computer but the user told me that she didn't do anything remarkable since yesterday.

Answer 1

The culprit was the In Product Messaging Application (ipmgui.exe) of Avira AntiVirus.

I killed the respective process in the Task Manager and the behaviour disappeared.

UPDATE: Killing the process appeared to be just a temporary solution. It re-appeared soon after. I de-installed Avira and installed an other anti-virus SW.

Answer 2

Even if this is an older question there are still many users running Avira free antivirus and the ipmgui.exe-problem is really annoying.

I found it is a perfectly working solution to install Bill2´s Process Manager (https://www.bill2-software.com/processmanager/download-en.shtml) and there you can easily create a rule for ipmgui.exe to kill the process swiftly when it´s started. Additionally you can configure a tooltip to be shown in systray when this happens and also you can see statistics for e.g. process executions.