Buggy/erratic Logitech mouse behavior
 

I have a Logitech MX610 mouse that has been causing me a huge amount of headaches recently. It behaves very erratically. Among its problems are:

• Scrolling with the mouse wheel occasionally acts like a delayed left click. For example, in Thunderbird, when I'm scrolling down the list of messages, it will occasionally decide that I wanted to open, say, three of them. Thunderbird then slows down for several seconds while opening the messages. This makes scrolling through messages extremely difficult and frustrating. I have the same problem pretty much any time I try to scroll past something clickable (a list of URLs on a webpage; the 'code', userinfo or reply box on forums like linuxquestions.org; text in almost any editing environment such as gedit or OpenOffice.org; a list of files in Nautilus; almost anything). The mouse seems to hesitantly want to act as if I've left-clicked on whatever I scroll past. Grr!
• It is very slow to notice when I start moving it. I have to move it all around before it finally seems to perk up and realize that yes, I want it to act as a pointing device and not a paperweight.
• The clicking speed is very erratic. When working in OpenOffice.org Draw, it sometimes clicks and unclicks (i.e., basically does nothing) when I try to select objects. Other times it acts like I've double-clicked something and goes into text-editing mode instead of object-editing mode. This wastes a lot of my time.
• There are other problems, but I'm too frustrated to remember them.

Here's the relevant section of my xorg.conf:
I'm using Gnome 2.10 in Mandriva 2006. What can I do about these mouse problems? Please help!