5th Mouse Button and Expose and Spaces

Yep, similar issue here, on both my machine and a mate of mines.
But rather than the 5th button not working it appears that on my machine, 'show desktop' is un-assignable and on my mates machine, spaces is not playing nice.
Logitech MX laser on mine, and a cheapo multi button USB mouse on the other machine.

Very odd indeed.

Similar problem here. I'm using the Logitech VX Nano.

I did find a workaround. In the control panel for my Mouse (Logitech Control Center, not the Mouse preferences) I can set the button I previously assigned to Expose to Keystroke. You can then enter a keystroke and assign it to that button.

You need to TURN OFF the expose keyboard shortcut in preferences so that you can enter that keystroke for your mouse. If you don't turn it off, every time you try to enter the key, you expose all windows instead of entering it into the preferences.

1. Turn off Expose Keyboard Shortcut in Keyboard Preferences (but remember what it was...F9 for me)
2. Set your mouse button to do a keystroke instead of Expose, but then enter the keystroke you will use (F9 for me).
3. Go back to keyboard preferences and turn back on the Expose keyboard shortcut.

Hopefully either Logitech or Apple will fix this issue so we don't need a workaround.

I am also having the same trouble, except I use mouse 4 and have a Logitech g5. I would rather not install Logitech's always running crapware, but I have gotten so used to using mouse4 for spaces, that I just might do it, unless someone else can figure out a fix for this, maybe it is a plist error?

I totally agree with xGrill, surely there must be a way to get around this without using the Logitech software, and even with this somewhat 'hackish' solution, it is only applicable to users with a Logitech mouse.

What is odd is that my spaces works on whatever button I assign it to, but my show desktop doesn't whereas the other Snow Leopard machine I have used has the issue with spaces and not show desktop. And these are two almost identical Mac Minis...

As it stands, this would have to be my biggest gripe so far with Snow Leopard (other than not being able to select a desktop in spaces using the assigned spaces button on the mouse)

Ok, I have solved the problem here.

By deleting the preference file "com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist" in the preferences folder in my user account, logging out and back in, I was able to set any mouse button to do whatever I want.

Hope this helps 🙂

Cheers!
neon

Deleting "com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist" is the key. It solved the problem for me.
Thanks to neon x 🙂

Where is the file located? Thanks!

If you head to your "Users" folder, at the top level of your boot drive, then into your user folder, which will be named the same as your user name (should have an icon of a house) you should find a folder in there called "Library". Head into that and there will be a folder called "Preferences", open that up and the file should be in there.

Good luck 🙂

Found it, thanks. It didn't work the first time so if anyone else has this problem I found that you have to delete it and sign out pretty fast. The first time it just recreated the file and the glitch was still there. Thanks for the help.

I agree... problem keeps coming back. Feeling a bit clunky.

Hmmm, just tried restarting, and sure enough, back comes the problem.

I have pretty much tried everything I can think of for now.
Deleting all prefs are no joy, neither is creating a new user account as that also displays the same behaviour.

So for the moment, I have just resorted to using USB Overdrive to assign keys to the buttons in a similar matter to what Jon has suggested with the logitech software. This seems to work betweens log-outs and reboots, but still feels like a bit of a clunky hack to me.

Hope we can get this sorted 🙂

the workaround I use with my microsoft mouse for now is the following.
it allows you to set a mouse to do a keystroke. I set my rear thumb button to press F8 and then set Spaces to activate when you press F8 (that's the default I think). now it activates Spaces just fine except for some strange reason it does not work if System preferences is the active application.