5th Mouse Button and Expose and Spaces

Knocking wood here, but it hasn't happened to me for a great deal of time now. Actually, not happened since November 2009...

Bill

I'm having this issue as well. My issue seems to be with whatever mouse button I assigned to spaces, won't work. However spaces will work with a keyboard short cut (F8 in my case)

This was solved for me after upgrading to 10.6.3 ... It was just annoying, but it's gone now, hopefully forever.

10.6.3 fixed it for me on the first several reboots, but now it's back -- whatever button I assign to spaces does nothing. It's stayed that way through 3 reboots now. Argh, I was really hoping this was fixed.

Same problem here. Thought it was fixed after the 10.6.3 update, but it came back after some reboots.
The weird thing is that it's working sometimes. I have no clue what I have to do to make it working. Sometimes I'm just starting my Mac and it works. The same thing can happen the other way round.

Well, it would be really nice to get a solution for this (finally). I never had a problem under Leopard with that.

I have this same problem and it is very annoying. If I fix it by using the workaround it goes back to being broken after a reboot.

It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult for Apple to fix this.

I have been trying to resolve this for some time. I've tried deleting the com.apple.whatever file, but that doesn't work after reboot. Feeling desperate, I installed the mouse drivers for the Kensington Optical Elite that I'm using to assign a keystroke to the 5th button. I didn't like the service running in the background and ultimately that is only a bandaid. Not a real fix.

I uninstalled the drivers, rebooted, and the problem is now gone. Haven't rebooted again. Could go back. But thought this was interesting. Maybe helpful.

I can't believe it..10.6.4...still won't work!

Not sure if one can vote somewhere for that bug, so I leave my vote here: I have that problem too and it is really annoying as it disrupts the workflow.

Btw. I used 10.6 for several months and it worked fine, it showed up for me only a few (maybe 2) months ago (MS IntelliMouse Optical 1.1A)

I'm having the same issue with a cheap dynex USB mouse. The 5th button seems to work as some kind of scroll in firefox. In Chrome it opens a clicked link in a new tab, but in the rest of the OS it doesn't do the assigned function of Showing the Desktop.

Over a year later... and this silly bug is STILL unfixed (just applied the 10.6.5 update).

Apple, you will lose customers with this kind of support.

I think that I figured out a workaround for this problem.

I recommend backing up before attempting this since it will overwrite some of your settings.

What I did was went to System Preferences -> Accounts and created a new user. I set the user as an admin but I don't think it makes a difference.

I then logged out of my current account and then logged in as the new user.

From Applications->Utilities->Terminal.app I did the following:

mkdir /tmp/files
cp ~/Library/Preferences/* /tmp/files
cd /tmp/files
rm com.apple.dock.db
rm com.apple.dock.plist
rm com.apple.finder.plist
rm com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
[I delete these since they make direct reference to the new account name]

ls /Users
[Your original account name should be listed here, use it for the following command:]
sudo chown originalaccountname *
sudo chgrp staff *
sudo mv * /Users/originalaccountname/Library/Preferences/

Logout of the new account and log back in as your normal user and everything should be working again! You can then go back to System Preferences -> Accounts and delete the new account.

It used to be that if I logged out and back in, this would fix itself. But that no longer works. Argh.