Disabling horizontal scrolling using mouse wheel

Question

I am using Windows 7 x64 on an iMac (via BootCamp) with the button-less Magic Mouse that comes with the iMac. I would like to disable the horizontal scrolling that happens when you move slightly the finger horizontally while doing a vertical scrolling.

In the Control Panel, Mouse section, Wheel tab, Horizontal Scrolling section, the minimum value that you can enter is 1, not 0. Is there a way (in the Registry) to disable horizontal scrolling using the mouse wheel? Or to set that value to 0 to see if it does the trick?

Notice that this is a Windows specific question, not Mac OSX or Apple or Magic Mouse question, it can apply to any mouse in Windows whose wheel supports horizontal scrolling apart from vertical scrolling.

Answer 1

Maybe AutoHotkey could be setup to catch (and ignore) mouse horizontal scrolling?

Check out WheelLeft and WheelRight: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Hotkeys.htm

Answer 2

I'd just like to add that Matthew's solution worked for me for a related problem. I was using Chrome on Windows 7, and when I tried to middle click a bookmark that was in a folder in the bookmarks bar, it would frequently close the folder and send the middle click through to the bottom of the page. It turns out it was registering the side scroll clicks of my mouse (which I never use) and dismissing the active folder dropdown.

I tried to vote the answers up, but apparently I have no reputation... Anyway, if google picks this up and I can help solve someone else's problem, that'll be enough for me!

Answer 3

When you tried to override the side to side movement of the mouse with AutoHotKey, what did you use? If you wrote

WheelLeft::return

WheelRight::return

it should have globally disabled horizontal scrolling. Anyhow, I guess my question is, what did you say in AutoHotKey?