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This should be easy, right? Well, for reasons unknown to me it isn't. Win2k/98/95 got two sliders: one for sensitivity and one for acceleration. This was great. This was easy. WinXP, however, assumes you always want to use some degree of acceleration - unless you're using the lowest sensitivity setting, which is quite frankly unusable. This is really irritating - especially if you consider that people who disable acceleration typically use a rather high sensitivity. There is only one slider which controls both settings and there is a check box, which can be used to "improve" the sensitivity... whatever that means.

Why am I writing about this anyways? There should be zillions of pages about that topic, shouldn't it? Well, while that's true all I saw so far only contain some nonsense. And they all copy&pasted from each other. Gee. That really helps.

So, here is the step by step guide without any further ado:

1. Fire up regedit.exe.
2. Head over to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse.
3. Click on the "mouse" folder on the left, then File->Export. This allows you to restore your old settings if the need arises.
4. Set MouseSpeed to "0".
5. Set MouseThreshold1 to "0".
6. Set MouseThreshold2 to "0".
7. Set MouseSensitivity to, well, something. Try "12" for starters.
8. File->Exit or close via 'x' (don't use Alt+F4 - regedit will discard your changes!).
9. Logout, login, and test your changes. If you aren't satisfied change MouseSensitivity again and repeat.
10. Once you're satisfied export your new mouse settings (see step #3) using a different file name. Keep this file around in case you need to restore your new settings. If you change anything over at the mouse control panel, it will nuke your settings and you'll have to restore them.

I'm sure there is some magical rundll32.exe user32.dll,something call which would get rid of that annoying login/logout cycle. Oh well... at least my mouse doesn't suck anymore. ;)

Update: Multimedia Fusion's configuration tool can be used to apply different sensitivity settings. Noitu Love 2 ships with it for example. It's a great game by the way and it works so much better without mouse acceleration. :)