Comment 19 for bug 296610

This bug is indeed quite frustrating. I can consistently reproduce it on my Latitude E6400 by using the pointing stick and touch pad simultaneously. One might wonder why anyone would want to use both at the same time, but when you use the pointing stick exclusively as I do, it is simply unavoidable because the palm of my hand will occasionally brush up against the touch pad. It's unfortunate that disabling the touch pad has no effect, even though the touch pad does not respond to input on its own when disabled. Something funky must be going on at the driver level.

I should mention that the patch that was posted by Matthew Chapman (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/991762) seems to remedy the problem although I haven't really had a chance to test it extensively. It's also inconvenient that it needs to be applied manually every time a new kernel is released.

I wonder if it's possible to disable the touch pad completely at the driver level for those of us how don't use it, and vice versa for the pointing stick. It's obviously not the solution to the problem but it might be useful as a temporary fix. I tried looking at the alps driver source, and although I have some experience as a programmer, I find it quite cryptic. If anyone can explain the changes that need to be made to accomplish this then I would be grateful.