I run Mandriva and my environment of choice is Windowmaker. Until Mandriva 2006, I always could switch virtual desktops by just having the pointer on the background using the mouse wheel. Ever since Mdv 2007 (and 2007.1), that feature doesn't work anymore.

It's not a problem of a wrong config on Windowmaker part (I double checked the config files, and even went so far as to create a brand new user to test it, with no success).

After looking around a bit, I came to realize that with Mdv2007 came the upgrading of xorg from 6.9 to 7.x. My guess would be that for some reason xorg doesn't pass the wheel command to Windowmaker (if that makes sense, the wheel works fine otherwise).

Would anybody have any suggestions?

6.9 to 7.0 would have no effect, since they are exactly the same in terms of behavior (just built differently). Xorg-7.1 and 7.2 are different from 6.9/7.0 but I don’t see why it would prevent your window manager from responding to mouse events in your root window…

Do other such events work (not sure if you had something configured where you left or right click on the root window to open a menu or something like that)? How about other scroll events (on “normal” windows)?

Actually I figured it out: the problem comes from imwheel that grabs the wheel command and prevents it from getting to windowmaker.

So far the only stopgap solution I've found was to kill it each time I started my desktop (PIA).