Mouse clicks suddenly stopped working in Ubuntu

Got this one too. The odd thing is, it doesn't take clicks from my mouse, but it fully recognizes my touchpad.

Anyway, opening a terminal (e.g., with Ctrl+Alt+T) and typing:

metacity --replace &

will make it work if you're using compiz. If you want compiz back, type:

compiz --replace &

and the mouse will work again.

It's easier getting to the terminal if you have Gnome-Do or if you assign a hotkey to it (like the super/windows key or tilde (~).

WARNING: Don't stop metacity/compiz commands once started or you'll be in worse situation than you were before.

WARNING 2: The above command can force to log out, but still it's useful for issues like:

• command key (super key) doesn't work
• left click doesn't work

For what it's worth, I went into the package manager and searched for, 'mouse'. After that, I clicked on all the already installed applications (there aren't that many) and reinstalled all of 'em. Then I searched for 'keyboard' and did the same thing. Not much change there, either. Finally, I searched for 'input' and found a file called, 'inputattach'. Reinstalled it and my mouse problems are solved. Works like it did on the day I installed 10.04. It's so nice to have a mouse that behaves itself and works like it should, again.

I'm a relatively new Ubuntu user, but instead of asking a lot of questions and then waiting for someone to reply, I decided to try and do something about it on my own, and solved my mouse problems (computer mouse, that is...;)

What the file re-installation cleared up, was the need to click several times to open up a folder, having to hold the button down for sometimes as long as three or four seconds before the click would be activated, or having to right click to open a folder or open a file with a particular application.

Just wanted to share this with you since the 'input' of my mouse now seems to once again, be completely and fully 'attached' to my computer.

Some things to try:

• Switch to and from a virtual terminal Ctrl + Alt + F1,Alt + F7.
• Activate the screen-lock Ctrl + Alt + L to hopefully reset the X11 window manager.
• Restart the window manager with something like ( DISPLAY=0.0 marco --replace ). You need to replace marco with whatever window manager you are running (compiz, unity, metacity, ...).
• Close any virtual machines, VNC clients, games, etc. that might have grabbed the mouse. For example: killall vmplayer might initiate a virtual-machine suspend operation.

from personal experience (Ubuntu 14.04, logitech wireless mouse) :

2 ways to get it working again for a short time 1 - unplugging and replugging the mouse, 2 - alt-F1 to switch to text mode then alt-F7 (or F8) to switch back to graphics

very recently completely removing "mousetweeak" seems to have resolved a particularly nasty case of "no left click"

my problems used to be infrequent and unplugging the mouse would fix it for a few days, but the most recent case had me working the USB plug every 2 minutes.

for now after the above mentioned uninstall - it seems to be working

EDIT: spoke too soon, problem persists

I found that this was just a problem with the mouse. The left button has pretty much stopped working. Other buttons seemed to stop working because the left button gets "jammed". After restarting with the other mouse plugged in, it worked fine.

Damn, I seem to have gone through so many mice and/or keyboards recently...