Google chrome exiting tabs when I click on themk

There are many, many google hits on this problem. Most of them agree that the issue is that somehow the middle mouse button (or mouse wheel button) has been stuck down, causing each left click to register as a middle click. Apparently Chrome has a bunch of middle click behaviors, one of which is closing a tab with one middle click. Since the mouse drivers on my laptop routinely go awry when I've overloaded it, this is fairly likely to be what happened. Also I'm getting other middle click behaivors, probably my only recovery option is to reboot the stupid thing. Some links:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Ok8jGiAXU00