Getting IntelliType for Microsoft keyboards and/or mice to load at startup in Mountain Lion

To date, Microsoft hasn't fixed the issue with the IntelliType drivers in Mountain Lion so they load by themselves. You have to open the System Preferences and click on the Microsoft Keyboard or Mouse panes to get them to load. The following will eliminate the need to perform these manual steps.

I'd like to give credit to the person who first discovered this, but having found the same text in numerous places, I can't single out the origin.

1. Navigate to the folder /Library/PreferencePanes/ of the startup drive
2. Right click on Microsoft Mouse.prefpane for mice, Microsoft Keyboard.prefPane for keyboards
3. From the resulting contextual menu, select Show Package Contents
4. Navigate down to Contents > Resources
5. Leave the Resources folder open on the desktop and open the System Preferences
6. Select Users & Groups
7. Click on your user account and then the Login Items tab
8. Go back to the Resources folder on the desktop, select the file MicrosoftMouseHelper or MicrosoftKeyboardHelper, then drag and drop it into the Login Items window on the right hand side of the Login Items page (in the System Preferences window).

In the sample below, I added the keyboard helper.

Repeat the steps if you added the keyboard helper and also need the mouse helper.

Now when you restart or start up your Mac, these helpers will load automatically.

For users wondering if this is some sort of hack, it is not. If you've used IntelliType in Lion, Snow Leopard, or other previous versions of OS X, you'll see that MicrosoftMouseHelper and/or MicrosoftKeyboardHelper are in the user account Login Items. What's probably happening is security changes in Mountain Lion, such as sandboxing, are preventing these Login Items from being added during installation. So all you're doing is manually completing a step the IntelliType installer is failing at.