mouse single click behaving as double click in ubuntu 16.04

Question

I am running ubuntu 16.04 which I keep constantly up to date. Just recently, with no other changes than those updates, it has been interpreting single clicks as double clicks. This is somewhat intermittent, but happens a considerable part of the time. Should it matter, the mouse is an old Logitech USB mouse. Changing double click speed in the mouse preferences does not change this.

There are some old bug reports that are similar, but this seems like possibly a new bug or a resurrection of an old bug. Can anyone help?

Addendum: The problem has been solved, but without knowing quite what did it. The bug occurred in 2 ubuntu 16.04 installations, one with many additional installs on it, and one that was on a VM and which was absolutely box stock install of 16.04.2 with the standard updates. Both were updated to the latest as of July 8 or 9. The problem with the mouse (which had already existed for a week or more) continued to exist all that week. On July 15 both installations were updated to the latest again. The problem ceased to exist on both of them. What I infer from that is that there was a bug somewhere in ubuntu, and someone spotted and fixed that bug, with the update going out between July 9 and 15. Both installations have been free of mouse problems since the July 15th update.

Solution

A possible solution is that your mouse is simply broken, as described here. You can check with Ubuntu's Event Tester from the x11-utils package, start with

xev 

The only thing which should up in your commandline when you press the left mouse button in the square is something like:

ButtonPress event, serial 38, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001,
    root 0x1e4, subw 0x3c00002, time 804378, (57,56), root:(210,135),
    state 0x0, button 1, same_screen YES

No other event should show up.

Comments

[ravery]

just to be sure, in mouse settings ... do you have double click set? also check the setting in your file manager

[alangh]

@ravery In the mouse settings, Double-click is set to about 2/3 of the distance from slow to fast. What setting are you referring to in nautilus, and where would I find it?

[ravery]

that is the speed, there is a button to select single click vs double click

[alangh]

@ravery That button is not present. (The only button is for selecting the primary button - left or right.)

[ravery]

check the file managers settings

[alangh]

@ravery For nautilus, where are those found?

[ravery]

files.zimpics.org/os/Nautilus_Maxed.png

[alangh]

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

[pa4080]

Possible duplicate of How to open on single mouse click

[Fabby]

Possible duplicate of How to enable single click?

[Kjetil S.]

Same here, old Logitech mouse. What helps for me is suspending the laptop (Dell Latitude, ubuntu16.04) and wake it up again.