Mouse double clicking

Is it a common problem for a mouse to automatically perform double clicks as it gets old? I've had my microsoft intellimouse optical explorer for a few years now, and all of sudden, every so often I get a double click action when I try to single click.

Keith

 

It's not frequent, but it's common enough that I've tossed two of them for the problem. In the electrical/electronic field, it's called "contact bounce ".

It's a combination of the spring in the switch getting weak and the switch contacts perhaps corroding or deforming slightly due to constant actuation. When the button is clicked, the movable contact impacts the stationary one, and bounces off of it just long enough that when it reconnects, it's read as a second click.

This effect has been a curse in digital electronics for years, to the extent that special "anti-bounce" circuits are designed to ignore the second contact if it's within a certain period.

A new mouse is a cheap cure.