Finally figured this out. The problems is of course, not putting in the base.disableMouse() call. I had thought it would be brilliant to return the camera position when I had moved the mouse to the exact camera position that I wanted to use as the start position so I could hard code it. But, it gave strange, inconsistent results. Then I put in a key press to stop and start the camera task. Whenever the camera task was removed, the camera would jump back to its odd start position. At which point I realized that the task must make a call to base.disableMouse(), and indeed when the task is stopped, I can move the camera with the mouse, but not when the task is going. Haven’t checked yet to see what exactly is making this call. Really unfortunate this is the way things are set up, as one of the pain in the butts about Panda3d is figuring out how to get the initial positions of stuff correct, and being able to move the camera where you want it with the mouse and then save that camera position would help.