LinuxQuestions.org - out of ideas on imwheel

ive set up imwheel 0.9.9 which came with the mandrake 9.1 install cd. after installing that package, ive tried to make the side butons do stuff, but without success. i can tell where my xf86config-4 is screwed up:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/usbmouse"
#Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse2"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
EndSection

i tried with bouttons 7 uncommented and that didnt work either. if i change it to /dev/psaux the mouse doesnt work at all

i cant find a .xinitrc or .xdefaults in my ~/ dir. also, my mozilla entry in /etc/X11/imwheelrc looks like:

"^Mozilla.*"
#
# If you want to scroll by a few lines then uncomment these 4 lines
# and comment out the paging 4 lines below these!
#
Shift_L, Down, Page_Down, 1, 1000, 1000
Shift_L, Up, Page_Up, 1, 1000, 1000
None, Down, Down, 7, 1000, 1000
None, Up, Up, 7, 1000, 1000
#
# If you don't like page scrolling then comment these out and uncomment above!
#
#Shift_L, Down, Down, 7,
#Shift_L, Up, Up, 7,
#None, Down, Page_Down, 1,
#None, Up, Page_Up, 1,
# Left/Right & Thumb stuff
None, Thumb1, Alt_L|Left
None, Thumb2, Alt_L|Right

but that doesnt seem to do anything at all.

when i run xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5" as a regular user it seems to activate stuff fine (ie my mouse wheel scrolls mozilla instead of the side buttons) but when i run imwheel i get:

$ imwheel -k
WARNING: imwheel process could not be verified, it may not be running anymore, that's OK!
: No such file or directory
WARNING: imwheel pid file could not be removed.
Perhaps you want the -p option.
Or SUID root the imwheel executable...
: Operation not permitted
ERROR: Couldn't write pid to pid file
Perhaps you want the -p option to avoid this...
Otherwise you may SUID root the imwheel executable.
: Permission denied

so i run it as su:

# imwheel -k -b "67"
WARNING: imwheel process could not be verified, it may not be running anymore, that's OK!
: No such file or directory
INFO: imwheel started (pid=2655)
/root/.imwheelrc: No such file or directory
Unrecognized wheel action in config.
Thumb1

i have no idea where to go with this especially since the thing works with the same exact mouse on my laptop! thanks in advance if you made it this far!