You probably chose that SoftICE should run in full screen mode. SoftICE _must_ support your graca for this mode. If it doesn't, you will have to run SoftICE in window mode.
That's why I recommend to run SoftICE in window mode. Maybe this solves your first problem.
Mouse Problem: Do you use an USB mouse? I'm using one and I can't use it in SoftICE
Symbol Package: I'm not using the symbol package and I also have WinXP SP1 installed on my PC (but no Hotfixes) (I didn't know that there's a symbol package available
). I've no problems with SoftICE without the symbol package.