It worked just fine two weeks ago when she used it during the Seaside trip. It hasn't even been turned on since the last time she shut it down on that trip. So why would it suddenly decide that there are no pointing devices?
I expect that troubleshooting this may take an evening of fiddling about with the computer and driver disks, with lots of rebooting and false starts. This is an evening I do not have available, because I really want to get to bed early tomorrow on account of having to be up so early to go to the airport. But this was the computer that was supposed to drive the Match Game titles. I can use my own laptop -- that's the one on which I developed the slide show anyway -- but I prefer to use the backup machine for this, because it has far less loaded on it, and at least in theory should be less susceptible to failures "on the fly" like the embarrassing error message my laptop threw up during the load-in to the Interaction Closing Ceremonies.