I have a microsoft intellimouse explorer and I'm hoping to get some practical use out of the side buttons. In windows, I have it set up so that the side buttons produce a complex keystroke (something like ctrl+ alt + N), and I have those keystrokes set as global hotkeys for winamp. this enables me to use one side button as a play/pause button, and the other to skip to the next song. I'm trying to reproduce this in linux. I got the side buttons working "correctly" , but I would like to map them to a keystroke. any suggestions?

Yeah I really want to know how to do that!
That is the final step I need to DEL Windows!
I cant work in Maya W/O mapping my side buttons Ctrl and Alt
So if any1 knows how to do that (KDE3.1 Mdk 9.1soon2) please post here!

You will want to use IMWheel, here is the manpage:
http://jcatki.no-ip.org/imwheel/imwheel.1.html

Here is another reference:

http://koala.ilog.fr/colas/mouse-wheel-scroll/