UPDATE: It’s a physical/hardware issue. I did some more plugging and unplugging and tried the live disk. It’s my wireless keyboard and mouse. I’m still not sure what the cause is since they were running fine.

At some point in October or early November, my Cinnamon desktop started acting up.

Whenever I press the “Ctrl” key on the laptop keyboard or the Bluetooth one, it starts zooming in, if the program has that capacity. For example, it does it in LibreOffice and Firefox but not Terminal or Nicotine+.

I checked the keyboard shortcuts and bindings but I didn’t see any issues there.

At the same time, the mouse/trackpad is misbehaving. This is much more frustrating because it’s inconsistent and challenging to recreate.

The easiest example to use is Nicotine+. When I click on a tab, it scrolls through the previous tabs until it gets to the main one.

It won’t happen in other programs with tabbed screens, but I’ll get a similar behavior in some drop-down boxes or using autofill - the list won’t remain open. I’ll click to open and it opens for a split second.

I don’t have a ton of additional programs and I don’t get into the nuts and bolts - I only run the recommended updates. I don’t know of anything that changed.

I have a Debian USB ready to go in case I can’t get anywhere with this. I’m also posting this in a couple of Mint forums.