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[The Fifth Horseman]

Hiya, folks.
Got some trouble with my "new" DOS gaming rig.

After going through the dismantling and subsequent reassembly - several times, in fact - then all neccesary maintenance of the components and additions: replacing the worn out CD-ROM drive, attaching the muffler mats to inside of the case and trimming them to fit (a job and a half by itself, IMO) etc - you know the drill - and finally the OS installation (DOS 7.1, booting from a freshly recorded boot floppy and then installing from CD - computer refused to boot from several copies of the CD) - I have two bloody irritating problems and a rather complex question I need answer to.

First, the COM-based mouse (Logitech 3-button on COM1) doesn't budge when running DOS. A Windoze installation on secondary HDD has no problem like that. I'm using the CuteMouse driver that was bundled in on the DOS install CD, and it detects the mouse all right - it just doesn't work.

+++EDIT: Went to backups of my old computer's HDD and dug out the Mouse.com from my A4tech mouse. That one works perfectly.

Second, it seems like something is screwed up with the keyboard layout the system is using - it doesn't register the number keys being presses and uses a QWERTZ layout instead of QWERTY. I guess I have probably set the wrong localisation setting during the install. As I am not too keen on having to reinstall the system again, I'd like to ask if there is - and if so, what is it - a way to fix that without reinstalling DOS?

Finally, the complex thing. Way back on my first machine (a DOS/Win3x machine nearly exactly 10 years ago) I had a boot menu for DOS which enabled me to select among several boot options - apart from a normal boot it had several other choices, that included starting with a minimum set of drivers (no mouse/CD/memory manager - that enabled me to play a particular himem-demanding game with both sound and music enabled), without extended memory manager and with the minimum driver set BUT with memory manager enabled.
Back then I have gotten the hang of how it worked enough to modify the settings for each option on my own, but I have no idea how to prepare something like that completely from scratch.
I'd be thankful if someone could tell me how it is done or point me to a guide on the subject.

Regards, Horseman.