Clicking just means the drive heads are dirty, not always dead disks. Try cleaning em first.

That "polished the creosote" bit is the real giveaway, sounds like it just burned it into a glass layer...

...and see, I've got the opposite problem where I'll spend two hours convinced the keyboard is dying, only to find out it was just my cat sleeping on my hand and I was typing with my elbow. That crumb thing though, that's the classic move. I once lost a whole Saturday to a mouse that kept double-clicking, took it apart, cleaned every switch, and it turned out I just had a loose USB port on the hub. The worst part is the pride hit, you know, you feel like a genius for fixing it and then you realize the "fix" was just being patient enough to look at it sideways. My rule now is if it takes more than 20 minutes, I walk away and come back with fresh eyes, because 90% of the time it's something dumb like a crumb or a loose wire. Still, three evenings, man, that's a whole movie marathon you could've watched instead of staring at a keycap.