How to enable scroll wheel?

[techno-wiz]

It's a logitech cordless mouseman optical. Model number is M-RR63. It has the left/right buttons, scroll wheel which is also a button, and a button on the thumb that used to activate the Back button in a web browser.

Yes, I'm restarting the computer between any changes made to my xorg.conf.

[RiceMonster]

Don't bother restarting, just hit Ctrl-ALt-Backspace after you've made the changes and log back in. That will restart X.

[bukwirm]

You could tale a look at this thread.

Also, type "xev" in a terminal, place the pointer in the window that comes up, and scroll one step in either direction. A message like the one below should appear in the terminal. Note the button number that comes up in each direction.

ButtonRelease event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
    root 0x4c, subw 0x1800002, time 1737637005, (34,53), root:(599,78),
    state 0x810, button 4, same_screen YES

[navlelo]

My scroll wheel didn't work when I logged on to my fairly fresh Hardy Heron install today (won't scroll, but the scroll wheel button works). It has worked perfectly until today. Yesterday I installed lots of multimedia stuff and played around with config files. There were a bunch of updates today, so it's almost impossible for a newbie like me to backtrack events and find out what has gone wrong. I have not made any manual changes to the mouse settings in xorg.conf, and as far as I can tell they are still at default.

I've tried bukwirms xev tip, and I get no response at all when scrolling the wheel, while all other movements and clicks are reported. I'm not sure what that means. Do I have a hardware problem, or could a software setting give this result? The mouse is 10 years old, so a hardware failure seems reasonable. I opened the mouse and made sure no dust were covering the sensors.

Could this be caused in software? If so, where should I start looking?

EDIT: This morning the mouse wheel worked again, and I don't know what happened. I would still like to know what xev outputs; is it unmodified port listening, or are those signals manipulated by settings/software? I tried Google.