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I'm not sure what happened, but I have some odd symptoms which I'll describe as detailed as possible. I have my suspicion that this is a software issue - but could as well be hardware. Maybe.

The problem arrived two days ago, on Ubuntu 16.04. I updated yesterday to 17.04 and then to 17.10, but that did not change things.

Symptoms:

  • in chrome, hovering my cursor over a tab will move the focus to the previous windows rapidly and reach the leftmost and stop, the same behaviour as scrolling up. Firefox does not show this behaviour since Firefox doesn't have the functionality of changing tabs with scrolling.
  • google calendar (chrome) my calendar will rapidly move to the past - just like scrolling up would.
  • Scrolling in web pages or textfiles is normal

=> both of these suggest my mouse is scrolling when it shouldn't, but that doesn't explain everything, since my mouse is not scrolling right now in the browser window, and also not in text files.

  • In gedit and atom editor, but not in this browser window, a thunderbird mail, the terminal or wps office pressing 'shift' on keyboard will move my screen up: just like scrolling up would. The cursor doesn't move. This happens with every time I tap shift, so even when capitalizing a letter or typing a symbol.
  • I tried another keyboard - which shows the same feature/bug: shift induces scrolling up.
  • I don't have a second mouse to test, but unplugging the mouse doesn't help: pressing shift still scrolls up
  • This is the case for both shift keys

I have tried rebooting ;-)

Do you have any suggestions what could be wrong or things I should investigate? Thanks in advance!

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It turned out that I still had an old wireless-mouse connector connected with a USB port to the back of my computer. Don't ask me how or why, but removing that one solved the problem. I hope this can help someone who comes across the same puzzling situation...

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  • In my case, my wireless key board simply needed new batteries. It almost seems like a software issue because of the selective nature of this problem-- it only affects some applications. All other keys were working properly, except the right-shift key in gedit which oddly caused gedit to scroll down. Good lesson here: check hardware first!
    – Enterprise
    May 27, 2019 at 16:07

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