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Well, having worked with computers a long time, I thought I had seen everything that could go wrong with a computer. Today, I learned that I was wrong. My Mac has been behaving extremely weirdly. While the keyboard is fine, the mouse holds extremely weird behavior. It will open apps from the Dock, but not open documents from a Stack. The top menu bar will work, but only after I restart Finder. I am unable to close most windows, except with Cmd+Q. Clicking on a link in Safari, for some reason, opens it in a new tab. I can not select checkboxes, but I know a click is going through because you can see a quick indent in the check box, before it reverts to the unchecked state.

I've restarted my computer, as well. I don't see a virus when looking through top, but I guess it could be subverting top. Does anyone have an idea what is going on?

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  • Does it have the same behavior with a different mouse?
    – Troggy
    Aug 7, 2009 at 6:57
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    This question is poorly titled.
    – Tadeusz A. Kadłubowski
    Aug 7, 2009 at 8:50
  • Do you have a suggestion? I'd be glad to put in a different title.
    – waiwai933
    Aug 7, 2009 at 16:00
  • @waiwai933: Yes. How about "Mouse on a Mac only working in specific scenarios" or something similar?
    – John Rudy
    Aug 7, 2009 at 18:35
  • how about: misbehaving mouse on mac
    – hasen
    Aug 19, 2009 at 3:45

3 Answers 3

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Are you using a mouse, or a trackpad on a laptop?

I've seen similar issues with a wired mouse - it just started misbehaving in very odd ways, but using another mouse (or the trackpad on the laptop) was fine.

Since all your issues appear to be mouse-related, I'd start there first - or try to confirm that it's not the mouse :}

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  • Why was this marked as the correct answer? What was the problem?
    – Charles
    Aug 7, 2009 at 16:03
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    It was the mouse, and this answer led me to it.
    – waiwai933
    Aug 7, 2009 at 17:18
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Probably a key is stuck (pressed all the time).

Try a software or a script that detects keypresses. If you're into programming or at least can write small scripts, check out this question I asked on SO: Detect in python which keys are pressed

also, this related question: Cross platform keylogger

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    yes and test a different keyboard to verify the problem disappears.
    – svandragt
    Aug 7, 2009 at 8:56
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Cannot comment for Mac, however I get this sometimes on my Windows machine.

Quickly try to press every "combo" key, such as control, alt, shift, the apple key, And / or whatever the mac has... on both sides, all of them.

On my machine, it is caused by holding one down just before I switch ports on my KVM, so the machine thinks it is pressed when it isn't

This causes weird behaviour so when I am typing, I can press m and everything minimises, e and explorer pops up e.t.c.

Or in CAD, i get the option / context menus as it thinks I am pressing a combo.

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