Disorderly Content

2005-06-22

When good mice go bad

This morning when I tried to use my PowerBook I had a small surprise waiting for me. First symptom: the scroll wheel on my mouse wouldn't. Scroll, that is; it wheeled just fine. I discovered that on a too-long page in Safari. And then discovered symptom number two: on a page with both vertical and horizontal scroll bars, the wheel was now scrolling the latter rather than the former.

It got stranger. In Excel, clicking left on a spreadsheet's tabs got me a click and an indication that the new tab was selected. But the display was still of the original page. And trying to select a cell selected a region instead. Fortunately, the right mouse button got me to the right tab/cell, albeit while also displaying a contextual menu.

Think. Think! Clearly the problem was in my venerable Logitech mouse. And unplugging, once I figured out which plug was the right one (too damn many USB devices), and replugging got things back to normal. But I wonder why my mouse suddenly started generating Shift key behavior after all this time. More to the point, I wonder if it'll start doing it again. Time to replace the rodent?

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