ATi 4870 Snow Leopard mouse issue

[jellymann]

I recently installed Snow Leopard on my PC. It is working very well except for one small problem. I think this might be a problem with the graphics because the exact same Snow Leopard install does not have this problem but it is running an intel graphics chip.

 

Problem:

Moving the mouse has no effect other than moving the mouse cursor until I click. e.g. When I mouse over the dock no names appear and it does not magnify (I have turned magnification on). It only magnifies once I click on a dock item, and it stays magnified until I click somewhere else. This also happens with drop-down menus: they don't highlight until I click on them. Also, the cursor doesn't change to the hand until I click on a link, and does not change into a text input cursor until I click on a text field. I suspect there is something wrong with compositing (I've seen similar things happen with Compiz and Gnome3 in linux on this same PC).

 

The system is still usable, but without the ability to mouse over things Mac OS X seems to loose a bit of it's smooth feel. Also, this problem occurs regardless of setting the arch=i386 boot flag.

 

If this has nothing to do with the graphics card I apologise for the inconvenience.

 

Here are my specs:

 

Biostar G31 M7 TE

Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 @2.5GHz

XFX Radeon HD 4870 1Gb GDDR5

4Gb RAM

 

I have not installed any updates and this is an old disc I had lying around so it's still 10.6.0.

I've held off updating because internet is very expensive where I live and a 700+mb update is a lot and will take over night to finish. If I must update to 10.6.8 then I will do so at the beginning of the month. In the meantime are there any alternate ATi drivers I can try with my current version of Mac OS?

 

Thank you very much.