Apple USB Mouse (Mitsumi)

I've noticed a problem with my (old) apple mouse. It freezes randomly for a few seconds nearly constantly. It seems this is not an entirely uncommon problem. While I do not have a solution, I have some insight into the problem. What appears to be happening is the mouse is disconnecting and reconnecting to the USB port quite frequently. I've seen this in my kernel dmesg output -- which shows I'm using Linux, but that shouldn't be material to the problem if it is the mouse which is faulting.

The solution is probably to buy another mouse. However it may be that dirt is causing sensor glitches and confusing the quadrature encoder, leading to a reset. The problem only shows up when the mouse is moved.

Opening it up to clean it seems like a difficult task, so I've not done that.

Your "what topic is this related to" does not seem to cover this scenario. I doubt there is a easy solution to this problem, but it seems to happen with non-trivial frequency to people so I hope this helps someone with the same problem.