10.3: Exposé bug wiith multi button mice and multiple users

Nov 10, '03 10:31:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I discovered this "hint" by accident last night: If you have fast user switching enabled in Panther along with Exposé using a multi-button mouse, you can wreck the mouse button assignments for other users.

  1. Log in two or more users at once.
  2. In any of the user's environments trigger an Exposé function using the buttons of a multi-button mouse. Specifically you have to trigger an Exposé function that isn't useful at the time, like showing all windows of one app in Finder with no Finder windows open, or showing the desktop with no windows open to begin with.
  3. Fast user switch into another user's environment. Now one of two things will happen: Either their mouse button assignments will be mixed up (causing left click to show the desktop for example) or every mouse button will only trigger an alert sound and do nothing (completely wrecking the ability to use a mouse).
How to fix:
In the case where the buttons are just mixed up, try triggering the "show all of one app's windows" Exposé function with the mixed-up mouse. That should set everything to normal again.

In the case of all the buttons losing their functionality, or if the previous fix doesn't work, just press Command-Shift-Escape and log out. Log into the user where the initial Exposé event was triggered, and resolve the event so that the windows return to normal. Now everything should be resolved.

I'm not sure how useful this is, but there you go.

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