On Windows 7, is there any way to make the scrollwheel's focus follow the mouse?

To get my Windows installation to scroll like Linux does (whatever the mouse is over is scrolled without necessarily having to have focus), I use a very small freeware app called AlwaysMouseWheel. Couldn't live without it on Windows.

X-Button Mouse Control!

This thing rocks... it is very intuitive to tech-people, don't know about to a normal person ) but if you figure it out, it is really powerful.

http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

and yes it solves this scroll/hover problem too:

• In the 'Default' profile change 'Wheel Up' to 'Scroll Window Up' and 'Wheel Down' to 'Scroll Window Down'.

but it is so much more

For instance some of the things I use it for:

• I have a Logitech Marathon mouse which is great because it has hyperscrolling and the batteries last 2 years but in Chrome for some reason when the hyper wheel is spinning, sometimes it can zoom your pages when you press CTRL. This happens a lot. So with this app I disable ctrl-mouse wheel when chrome is being used. Something that cannot be done by chrome itself

  • I set it up to alt-wheel up/down control the system volume. Quite useful

  • I configured alt-left click to take a screen shot of the active window, alt-right click for a full screenshot

  • I set 'Alt' key to activate 'Layer 2' (Settings > Modifier Keys), then on 'Default' profile in the Layer 2 I set Wheel Up/Down to scroll Window Left/Right respectively.

My favored solution is to use Wizmouse.

The Ease of Access setting merely sets Window Focus. Wizmouse sends scroll commands to the underlying window without setting the active window.

There are a few caveats. Namely, WPF and Silverlight application with subpanes won't play nice. For WPF application examples that would be Visual Studios and Expressions Studios. Some areas of Powerpoint also get whacked, but otherwise it performs as expected.