Panning

Sounds like you are using a mousdriver which has enabled special functions for ther buttons. You should disable these assignments.

I was having a simlier problem. When I went to use the middle mouse button to rotate and all that, it just wouldn't work. Im going to guess your using windows...

Click START(down in the tool bar)
Control Panel
Printers and Other hardware
Click Mouse

Now, after clicking Mouse mine has a picture of my mouse(more or less) and 4 buttons(my mouse has 4 buttons). The picture is labeled so that number 2 is clearly the mouse wheel. Your middle mouse button should be set to actually say "Middle Button". This fixed my problem... apparently its not good enough for it to be the button in the middle of the mouse, it has to be set to middle button. Im guessing, that you could in fact set a non-middle button to be the middle button, never tried it myself though.


Edit -- Thought I'd mention that what I think is happening in your case it that you have your middle button set to something that trys to do something on the desktop. Or maybe you just have it set to "minimize"