After working fine for years my scrolling with mouse or touchpad has started to go wrong.

I have tried all the options in Firefox (Edit>>Preferences>>Advanced>>General) to make the scrolling return to "smooth", but whether using the mouse wheel, sidebar, or touchpad the screen "refreshes" rather than scrolls.

The problem occurs with Firefox, OpenOffice, gedit - The only exceptions are with Chrome and the terminal!

No software has been installed or changed, at least not knowingly.

Not a major issue, but frustrating as I can't think what I have done!

Any ideas gratefully accepted.

Assuming you are using Gnome, have you checked the mouse settings in Gnome Control Center?

The Gnome control Centre only mentions scrolling under the mouse setting for the Touchpad. But I did alter this to Disable scrolling to see if it made any difference, but, as expected, it didn't.

Incidentally, scrolling works fine (ie no refreshing of the page) for the main panes of Thunderbird (the pane showing the Mailbox folders and the single line summary of e-mails) - but not for the e-mail detail!

Scrolling also refreshes the page in this (and other) forums.

Frank

Drat. I'm fresh out of ideas. Sorry.

The problem is not the mouse at all - it is the update to the later version of Ubuntu.

This disabled the ATI graphic driver in favour of the generic one, which cannot handle the smooth scrolling of the Firefox screen.

Thanks to http://osnovice.blogspot.com I eventually found this out and re-installed the ATI driver; now the mouse works fine.

I have no idea why only Firefox was affected; and while I understand the Ubuntu commitment to totally free software, I wish that they would realise how much trouble they cause by this automatic disabling of previously installed drivers, etc!!!!!

Another update - and back comes the problem! I am very annoyed that the drivers are not left alone, assuming that that is the problem.

At present I am trying to redo what I did last time, but cannot remember exactly how to replace the generic driver.

UPDATED: In Linux Ubuntu go to System>>Administration>>Additional Drivers
The system should scan and say that Proprietary drivers are available, but not activated. Click on the Activate box and the driver will be downloaded. After a reboot the driver will be used and the problem is resolved.