I had a similar experience when my my brother bought a nice Logitech optical mouse for his PC. I spent a few hours over there, upgrade hiw Win95 to Win98, hoping this would that USB would magically start working. But no. Occasionally the mouse would light up, but Windows steadfastly refused to talk to it, no matter how much fiddling round I did.

I said "You should get a Mac"
"Why?" he asked.

I pulled my iBook out of my bag, woke it up, plugged the mouse in and two seconds later it started working.

"Ah", he said.