Hopefully there is strength in numbers.
Here is a email I sent to the developer, who has replied, but I am still stumped, and would like any feedback here, and any reports of others who are having the same experience:
A few days ago, something strange started to happen to me in my use of the single click left button. On random occasion, it seems a extra click is sent down for some reason. It is hard as hell to track down, hard to explain as well. I started to see in Entourage, when I would click once on a email, it would pop open that email in a new window, as if I had double clicked on it. At first, I thought bad mouse button, so I swapped it out for another mouse, the problem persisted. Again, it is so random and sporadic that it is super hard to pin down. I am able to get it to happen in other apps, like the Finder for example, if I double click to open a folder, a third click is sent down, the third click happens so fast that before the double click has a chance to register, that third click sneaks in and changes window focus to the underlying folder, then the window opens, and it is not the one in focus. I hope that made sense, if you triple click a folder in the finder, you will see what I mean, the underlying folder window is the one selected. This happens however, when I am quite sure I have only clicked two times, not three. Perhaps the best way to see it in action in a way that makes sense is the "double click to minimize" feature of OS X. Often when all I want to do is move a window from one location to another, the problem happens and that window is minimized, even though I am more or less in a click and drag scenario.
I have tried everything I know to reproduce a test case to make it happen repeatedly, it will not. I am hopeful with your knowledge of the system and how the USB stuff works, maybe you can shed some light on all this.
Over the weekend I must have about 15 hours of testing this and trying to make it go away. I seem to always run into the most obscure hard to track problems :-) My first thought was to disable USB OD, which made no change, I was still having this ghost click happen. At some point I have swapped out mouses with 2 others, keyboards with 2 others, USB hub with one other, and tried all available USB ports, speed 1 and 2. I am pretty sure I can rule out hardware being the trouble. I also removed the USB hub and went for a PCI USB 2.0 card.
This finally had me so annoyed I decided time to reinstall the OS clean and start over. This is a huge task with all the apps and stuff I would need to reset, but I have done it before after the Kensington software messed up my boot times by a factor of 2, so I could do it again.
First, I want to ask a question. I uninstalled USB OD with your app uninstaller, and even after a reboot, I still had a pretty fast mouse. A trip the the keyboard and mouse prefs, toggling that, seemed to make it go back to pre USB OD settings. I am going to make a guess here, but are the OS keyboard and mouse settings stored in PRAM? Are you also shoving your settings into PRAM as well?
*Note inserted for MacNN forums:
It is told to me they are not stored in PRAM. That being said, I am at a total loss on how one restores OS X keyboard and mouse settings back to default, trashing all prefs and zapping PRAM does not do it!
So, clean reinstall of the OS, and I am still having the problem, at this point I was thinking some time date specific bug is happening, since the last software update I did was almost a month ago, and this is new to the past week. Then I started to think perhaps I need to really reset this machine. I erased the hard drive again, booted into open firmware, reset the NVRAM, then reset the PRAM about 10 times. I feel pretty sure I have eradicated any past settings of your software, I also reset the PMU as well.
I ran some more tests and ended up reinstalling the OS a few more times. I am now typing this email to you with your software not installed. I have spent the last 5 hours or so reinstalling apps and generally mousing around a lot. I have not seen this issue happen as of yet, so it looks like it may be gone for now. I am hating my computer at this point as the mouse is unbearably slow.
Have you heard of this?
So thats the email, I should mention now, that after running with no trouble, I finally gave in and installed USB Overdrive, problem came back right away, and now I can not get it to go away again. I have done all the tricks I know of. What bugs me is that I ran this same config for ages, USB OD has never let me down, now all of a sudden it is doing this, and I can not get back to where i was. I have not added any new apps to my system to make this a new issue, at a total loss here.
I would be damn happy to be able to know where this setting is coming from and how to get rid of it without a reinstall of the entire OS. I will pull the battery in the dual G5 tomorrow and see if that helps. I am going to take a trip to a Apple Store and plug in my mouse, just to see if somehow I have 3 bad mice on hand, not likely.
Suggestions, and ideally, someone say "ME TOO!" so I know this is not just me, googling on extra double click, triple click etc, thats a tough one to search out.
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