Wing Commander CIC

Been playing WC1 from the Kilrathi Saga for a week now and everything has run smoothly, but now suddenly every time I try to play the mouse cursor is pointing upwards every time I load it so that I can't select any options. The mouse even continues to do it when I Alt-Tab out of WC making it difficult to accomplish anything on the computer at all... I have to ctrl-alt-del and use tab to navigate to the kill process button just to shut the game off. Rebooting didn't help and I don't want to reinstall because I'm almost finish with the game! Any ideas?

Thanks!