Can a mouse crash?

Just had a repeat of the weird mouse-X disconnect I've encountered before. This time though, I'm running Debian Etch — so no more blaming the problem on SuSE (as I secretly always did :-).

One noticeable problem this time was that the middle button did not work, making click-to-paste impossible; I even ran xev and saw no events for middle-clicking. (This in addition to clicking being inconsistent, the client receiving the click being inconsistent, etc). Running cat /dev/input/mouse0 did not work. What did work was disconnecting the mouse (a USB 3-button optical jobbie), then plugging it back in. Sure, coulda been the mouse driver, or X, or something, but I wonder if the hardware itself — whatever little controller chip is in there — maybe got wedged. Interesting to think about…