OK, so I found the culprit. The reason I was getting the “DX11 device removed, reason 0x887a0006” error in LogLite, which was causing the in game problem of the mouse cursor slowing down, window eventually freezes, screen goes black, then everything goes back to normal was…
My new USB external backup drive. I’ve scoured the internet for this error, and it turns out it’s fairly common. One common theme I found was that often times the error was corrected by removing attached USB storage devices.
My trusty old external backup USB hard drive failed last week, after dutifully performing nightly backups of my entire system for ten years. I replaced it with a new drive, and I thought it had been working fine; all backups have proceeded as normal. But I either have a bad USB cable, or a bad USB slot on my mobo (or possibly a bad SATA to USB board in the drive enclosure), as removing the drive has allowed me to play EVE all day long without a single occurrence of this problem. I was averaging about ten minutes between occurrences, so going this long is enough to convince me that this was, indeed, the problem.
TL;DR: If this particular error code hits you, try removing every USB device you can and see if it fixes it. Then add your USB devices back one at a time…. you know what? I’m sure you can figure out the rest of the procedure yourself. : )
END TL;DR
To EVE Dev’s credit, most games don’t gracefully recover from this condition; they’ll either CTD or throw up a dialog box with the error code, and then exit the game. EVE, OTOH, gracefully reloads the GPU driver and continues running. Well done, devs… well done.
Now to get back to re-learning this amazing game…. one pod at a time. XD