I'm guessing it's something to do with the native Mountain Lion USB drivers, but I don't know what I'm doing in there to really figure it out. I know it's not a hardware issue because (a) it was working last week, and (b) I have an identical controller that behaves the same way. Now, I've repaired permissions, I've trashed preference plists, I've googled and googled, I've installed the latest Hardware I/O tools from the developer site, and I've (metaphorically) broken my MacBook Pro with my forehead. And at the beginning, when I restart with my controller plugged in, the computer thinks the gamepad is secretly a mouse and lets the d-pad move the cursor. What's really odd here is that, when I connect my gamepad, the Ink preference pane shows up. ControllerMate complains that it can't make a connection to the device and speculates that another application might be using it. System Information (formerly Profiler) shows my Sidewinder right there. It's *detected*, but unless I restart the computer with the gamepad plugged in and don't take it out, its *button presses* aren't detected at all, in any of the many applications that should be able to detect it.
I updated to Mountain Lion this weekend, and all of a sudden, my gamepad no longer works. I'd been playing various games using a USB gamepad (a Microsoft Sidewinder, one of the cheap ones, but this shouldn't matter).
