Invisible Mouse Buttons

I just ran into an interesting PEBCAK problem with a co-worker. (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard) He is using the Apple Mighty Mouse (at least I think that's what it's called, the white one with the tiny scroll ball) and had occasion to use a contextual menu. That in itself should be somewhat of a red flag, don't people use contextual menus all the time? Hmmm. Anyway, there is a plugin I've installed on all the department machines which copies the path of a file into the clipboard so you can paste it into an e-mail. So if Jim wants to tell Bob to open up the October Sales Projection document he right clicks on the file on the server, chooses this "Copy Path To Clipboard" command and pastes the string into an e-mail. Easy enough, right?

Now here's a criticism of Apple's hardware; they made a three button mouse that looks like a NO button mouse. It doesn't have buttons per se, but it has sensitive areas which function just like buttons. By default the driver is set to make the mouse one button. This is why the co-worker thought he could not right-click on the files. So I showed him how to change the driver preferences to make the right sensitive-invisible-button to be "Secondary Click" and the left side "Primary Click". This seemed to be fine for a few weeks.

Then today he says that he changed the prefs back to both sides being Primary Click because he was getting unwanted contextual menu popups in the Finder. Why? Well it's simple; because he always clicks with his middle finger on the right side of the mouse. Erm, okay... So it had nothing to do with the software or hardware, just that you're clicking the wrong button! Sheesh! So I explained to him the revelation that Control-Click is the same as Secondary Click on the Mac. What about swapping the buttons around? It's like he's left fingered on his right hand or something. Really really strange.