Mouse bit the dust

[shafe1]

Since I installed Mandrake My mouse had been kinda flakey!. It would jump around and sometines just passing over things seemed to launch them. Also in a lot of the games it would seem to freeze momentarily. I had a 3-button mouse and it was setup in Linux as a generic PS2 mouse. Well the other night it quit working and when we restarted the machine it came back with a blue screen for a program called Kudzu and said it couldn'it find the mouse. It gave me three options. the first time I chose to leave the configuration alone. That proved fruitless so I removed the configuration the next time I rebooted and got the Kudzu program again. I hoped when it booted (it always says it's checking for new hardware) that it would find the mouse and allow me to reinstall it. It Didn't.
To the point, my questions are...
does Linux have ( like Unix) mkdev? and can I use it to install a new 2-button mouse?
Or Do you think I should try to reinstall my 3 button mouse, only not as a generic ps2 mouse?
Any help is appreciated.