In July 2007, I was fortunate to win a copy of Windows Vista Business at a Gold Coast .NET User Group and it wasn’t until January 2008 that I installed it when I was re-establishing my geek prowess. Since that time, I’ve had very mixed opinions about Windows Vista – some have been really positive and others have been quite negative.
Within the last month, I’ve been having a problem with my Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer optical mouse. At whatever interval it feels inclined, whenever I would single click – Windows Vista would register a double click. It would then take several single click attempts before Vista Business would finally register a single click and not another double click. As you can imagine, if you’re mouse is registering double clicks nearly all the time – doing some of the most fundamental computer tasks becomes very difficult and tiresome.
In case software settings within Windows Vista or another program had gone astray, I went through a few different sections of basic Windows configuration to restore default settings such as Folder Options (single click to open an item) and also restored the mouse settings via the Control Panel without any success.
Virtually all of the problems I’ve been having with Windows Vista have been related to hardware driver support in some manner. With that in mind, I also tried uninstalling the current version of Microsoft IntelliPoint and separately changing my mouse drivers back to a standard mouse – neither of which helped. I thought something may have changed on my computer with a Windows Update or some other software. To rule out an incompatibility with my older version of the Microsoft IntelliPoint – I downloaded and installed the latest version via the Microsoft Download Centre but the double clicking symptom persisted.
This evening I connected an original optical Microsoft IntelliMouse which has been absolutely punished from gaming. While it was completely crusty from living in the bottom of a big plastic storage container for an unknown amount of time – the single double clicking issue seems to have vanished for the moment.
While the problem isn’t showing up at the moment, I don’t think that it is my original mouse that is causing the problems. Searching online shows that there are a lot of people having a similar problem – however after reading through a lot of different web sites, I didn’t come across a clear root cause.
Frustrating.
It sounds like it may be your mouse causing the problem. Especially since changing the mouse was the only effective solution. The microswitches in the mice these days are very fine and whilst built to be robust are nonetheless fragile little creatures. Perhaps you are due for a new one.
I thought I’d take my mouse to work with me and see if it plays up there as well. If it does, then it is nothing more than a worn out mouse causing me problems and it’s an easy fix.
In the meantime, I’m very happy that my original Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer is still working perfectly, even if it is a little crusty!
I’d like to see what happened when you brought it to work. I have a Microsoft Optical Intellimouse, and I have had the exact same issue since I switched to Vista 64 from XP. I used it just fine on XP for about a year and a half. Before that I had another Intellimouse that I had used for about 5 years on Windows MS and XP, the only problem coming from me taking it apart and the left side button not working anymore. With my new one I switched from XP, which it worked perfectly fine with, to Vista. On Vista within about 3 days I noticed it would randomly double click files. Now it will open a maximum of five windows with a single click. I’ve gone back and used it with computers running ME, 98, and XP, and it works fine. It has the latest drivers installed, and I’ve monkeyed around with the double click speed from min to max and it still does it. And yet Microsoft’s answer, and everything I’ve read is “It’s a crusty old mouse, get rid of it.”