Thanks rusty

Well, there was definately no mouse module found by lsmod.

So, I did add one. However, this made no difference. lsmod's output
shows "unused" next to mousedev.

A cat on /dev/ttyS0 still just returns.

Where is the "loading saved state" of serial devices coming from? I'm
still curious about this, as I hadn't seen it at boot time until I did the upgrade.

--mco