Soooo... not sure if this is a thing but... I swear.... can an in-game setting affect out of game performance?

I just played Lord of the Rings (the first one) on this relatively new computer, and if anyone has played that game on pretty much any computer since ohhh say 2000, you have to go into the game settings and sllllooooowwwww the scroll speed or it will scroll so fast on today's computers you can't see it. So I usually craft it way down, IIRC on my last computer I had it down to 50%.

So I lowered the scroll speed in LOTR 1 down to 50%. And it worked great.

What I'm seeing now though that I never saw on any computer before this one... after I got out of the game my mouse is moving sllllloooooowwwww on ANY and ALL applications (including this one... Firefox).

Huh?

Is that even possible or is this some sort of coincidence and something else has started just so happens right after I played that game? It seems too much of a coincidence to me.... but it also seems that in game settings don't affect out of game settings.... or this may be the first time I've ever seen it.

Anyone heard of such a thing? No way setting a scroll speed inside an old DOS game affects the mouse after you leave... right?