I agree with stwert. If you have the new touch mouse at home, throw it out and get a standard 3 button mouse.
that's just silly. The magic mouse goes great with the mac, you can do all sorts of things with it other than middle mouse click. It's less functional than the trackpad though. (Though I guess I just got used to it and I don't use a Mac for graphic work for the whole mouse lacking proper functions thing like you mention)
when you say 'zoom in' do you mean the entire screen zooms in? I saw that happen on a Mac once. I middle clicked and things didn't happen as expected. My solution was to find the command that does the panning, assign a hot key, and also throw it on the shelf. I think the button to turn your mouse to pan mode is on the default set of shelves in General
I just plugged in my 5 button Logitech mouse into one of my macs and it automatically assigned the middle button to show dashboard and back button to show expose. I don't have Maya on it so I can't tell if it was working properly, but I do have Unity on it which uses the same control scheme and it was fine. I didn't see anything about zooming in the system preferences. Maybe it's related to the mouse? Try a different one.
On a side note: I've noticed that designers without pens like to reassign the middle mouse to something stupid like expose. I'll never understand some people...
that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"
Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D