I had a situation a month ago where my computer froze up (it was a couple months old at the time) and literally nothing would respond, even control-alt-delete, but my mouse cursor would still move around. I have no idea what caused that (it was a fresh restart after installing a GPU driver) but whatever drives the cursor display must be even higher priority than C-A-Del.
Most graphics cards implement a hardware mouse cursor where the video card reads the current pointer location from memory and overlays the cursor on the screen. So I guess if the driver for the mouse and the video driver are both still running (the kernel hasn’t stopped completely) that will still work even if Winlogin is screwed to the point where it can’t show the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen.
Happy to be corrected by someone who knows more about the windows kernel. :)
Interesting I didn’t know that. Some part of the kernel was fucked for sure as even the hardware sleep button in my keyboard didn’t work but I guess if the display driver was functioning that would be all that was needed.
