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Is it me or must the keyboard interrupt be enabled for the mouse to work?

I also found that in bochs if you hit the keys when the mouse is BEINGinstalled, bochs gives a BIOS PANIC, later on, when the reset button is hit.

Hmmm, strange stuff.

How would one go about fixing these things? IRQ mask?

afaik, the keyboard handler is not required, as long as no key is pressed. Since the same chip will deliver keyboard and mouse signals to the cpu, if a keystroke is pending but noone reads it, no mouse interrupt can occur.

It will be necessary to unmask IRQ2 aswell as mouse IRQ and to acknowledge end-of-interrupt on both master and slave PIC, btw.