Have you tried running a memory hardware test, like Memtest OS X from http://www.memtestosx.org Try running it for a while to see if there's a hardware failure. As for the bluetooth mouse, use activity monitor to see which process is hogging the CPU when your mouse is being turned on. You may want to remove the mouse from bluetooth preference pane, and add the mouse again to see if that helps.
A dust blower will be very useful for this job (Those that people use to blow dust off their camera lens) I always have a dust blower, surgical gloves and a microfibre cloth when I repair things that involves the display.
Does the battery have any charge left? If not, there's a small possibility that the left I/O board is fried. I've fixed a MBP that cannot boot at all, and all is well after I changed the left I/O board. It's the one that contains the magsafe connection, USB and audio I/O interface.
Thanks for the advise.
Will check the connector on the audio board under a magnifying glass later. That was the part that I used some force to remove the cable. Yup, turned the volume all the way up.
Anyway, I knew the internal speakers connection was screwed when I zapped PRAM and there wasn't any chime.
I personally have migrated many Mac hard drives before.
Carbon Copy Cloner is great, but personally I prefer booting from the OS DVD and use asr on Terminal.app
This is done with the new drive in a cheap SATA-USB HDD case plugged into the Mac. Basic example of the asr command on Leopard. asr restore -source /dev/disk0s2 -target /dev/disk1s2 -erase This will clone disk0s2 which is the existing internal drive to disk1s2 which is the external drive.
Use the command "mount" to determine the drive name of the external drive. And at times where the hard drive content is huge, and I do not have the 3 or 4 hrs to wait, I'll use the -noverify option like in this example. asr restore -source /dev/disk0s2 -target /dev/disk1s2 -erase -noverify This will skip the verification after the restore process is done, cutting the time to about half.