[OAW]

I'm having some weird scrolling problems with Safari and I could use some troubleshooting assistance. First my setup ....

- PowerBook 1.33 Ghz w/768 MB RAM
- OS X 10.4
- Safari 2.0
- Kensington PilotMouse Bluetooth
- Kensington MouseWorks driver not installed
- Apple Bluetooth Software 1.6
- Apple Bluetooth Firmware 1.2 (?)


Ok here's the deal. When using the scroll wheel on my mouse in Safari sometimes it goes into "hyperdrive" mode where the slightest touch on the wheel .... not a turn ... I mean the slightest touch of the wheel will send the page scrolling down a page or so. Additionally, I sometimes find when I am scrolling up that all of a sudden the page will scroll down. This behavior is rather sporadic and I haven't been able to discern any rhyme or reason to it. So it's not all the time but it happens often enough (several times a day) to be extremely frustrating. Even when it's not happening the fact that it does so often makes me constantly aware of my mouse since I'm on guard for it to happen at any moment. I've had this mouse since Sept. 2004 and it hasn't given me any problems until this behavior started about a month or two ago. I listed my setup above but I had the same problem in Panther using Safari 1.2 and 1.3. It also occurred whether or not I had the Kensington MouseWorks driver installed. I've throttled down the Scrolling Speed in System Preferences but that makes no difference either.

So I'm trying to determine if this is a Safari issue, a bluetooth mouse issue (no scrolling problems with a USB mouse), or a combination of the two. I can't test Safari with another bluetooth mouse because I only have the one. So I have a few questions ....

1. For those using Safari with a bluetooth mouse ... are you experiencing any erratic scrolling behavior when using the scroll wheel?

2. Does anyone have any idea what the issue may be here? Is it more likely an issue with Safari processing scroll wheel events over bluetooth or the mouse itself?

3. I can't really test this with Firefox because it uses it's own internal scroll wheel settings. So could it be that the OS itself is having some bluetooth difficulties with scroll wheel events?

4. Are there some hidden Safari or OS X preference settings accessible via the Terminal that I could tweak to alleviate this problem?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

OAW

[OAW]

Ok. I was finally able to confirm that this is not a Safari specific issue. I was getting the behavior I mentioned above and decided to shut Safari down and re-launch to see if that cleared it up. After I did that Entourage became active and I the slightest touch of the scroll wheel ... not even enough to feel the next "notch" .... caused the email list to just start continuously scrolling down very rapidly. I think I was able to finally see it in another application because I didn't make a full turn of the scroll wheel after it started flaking out. For some reason when it goes nuts it will continue to respond to the slightest touch with dramatically accelerated scrolling until I make a complete turn of the wheel again. It's like this "resets" things and scrolling goes back to normal for a while until something, as yet undetermined, causes it to flake out again. So now I'm thinking this is more of an OS or OS/Bluetooth issue ... or perhaps a hardware issue. I know OS X has built-in scrolling acceleration. Personally, I wish it could be set separately from scrolling speed ... but oh well. It's almost as if the acceleration logic is thinking I am rapidly turning the scroll wheel when I'm not. Anyhoo, my questions remain though I imagine this thread is now more suitable in the main "OS X" forum.

OAW