Mouse Freezes at Character Profile Screen

[deswin]

Re Amnesia: The Dark Descent

My friend recently bought this game for me as a gift. It loaded OK, but when I try to play it gets to the screen where it asks for a new character Profile and then the mouse freezes up and will not move. Sound does not seem to be affected.

I am using Windows 7
NVidia-GeForce 6200 graphics card (PCI-e)
USB mouse
CPU=Intel Dual Core 3.22Ghz

I have tried the following:
(1) Replaced the SDL.dll file ver. 1.2.14.0 with ver. 1.2.15.0
(1a) Replaced the SDL.dll file with ver. 1.2.13.0
(2) Disabled display scaling
(3) Changed mouse from USB to old-style cable mouse
(4) Updated with 1.2 and 1.3.1 patches
(5) attempted a work-around by using ALT / TAB
(6) Changed from full screen to window mode
(7) Tried using several different display resolutions

Nothing solved the problem.

Next. I tried loading the game onto my older computer, still on WIN XP-SP3, which also uses NVidia-GeForce 6200 but AGP, not PCIe. (CPU=Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz, USB mouse) Same problem. Tried all of the same fixes listed above, but with no effect.