Touchpad going crazy

Hi! First of all, as I couldn't find a cause, I didn't know where to post this thread. If I posted somewhere wrong, please, move it to the correct place. Thank you

Today, I was using my laptop normally when, out of the blue, my touchpad started to behave strange. It would not move around the screen by itself, but its functions were all messed up. I tried reinitialization, restoring the system, removing and installing the synaptics driver, removing the driver again and installing no driver. Nothing worked. In safe mode was the same. The "touch click", however, worked a little. The touchpad now can't be used.
It's Win7 Home Premium 64bit. I was using at that moment, SKype, Opera, Gom Player, iTunes, firewall Comodo, antivirus Avira, Yahoo widgets and other system softwares I can't remember.
What can I do???

Hello Time Pink and welcome to Seven Forums.

Try using System Restore to go back to a date/time prior to when you first began having problems.

System Restore

You might have a hardware failure of keypad which requires replacement. Until you determine this with certainty you can use a USB mouse.

What I would do first is run a full scan with Malwarebytes to rule out infection.

Next run SFC -SCANNOW Command - System File Checker to check condition of System Files.

You said you changed out the driver. Try also uninstalling the driver in Device Manager, including software, then letting optional Windows Updates provide a driver or import it from your model's Downloads webpage.

Finally I would run a Repair Install which is the next best thing to a clean reinstall and will reinstall the OS while keeping programs, files and settigns in place.

If you have a factory preinstall or in-place Upgrade, these can be greatly inferior installs which hamper Win7's native performance so I would consider Reinstalling Windows 7.

I would also uninstall Comodo and your AV, and use MS Security Essentials or Avast5 with the Windows 7 firewall which gives much better performance and solves a lot of problem we see here.

marsmimar said:

Hello Time Pink and welcome to Seven Forums.

Try using System Restore to go back to a date/time prior to when you first began having problems.

System Restore

It was the second thing I did. Nothing worked.

gregrocker said:

You might have a hardware failure of keypad which requires replacement. Until you determine this with certainty you can use a USB mouse.

What I would do first is run a full scan with Malwarebytes to rule out infection.

Next run SFC -SCANNOW Command - System File Checker to check condition of System Files.

You said you changed out the driver. Try also uninstalling the driver in Device Manager, including software, then letting optional Windows Updates provide a driver or import it from your model's Downloads webpage.

Finally I would run a Repair Install which is the next best thing to a clean reinstall and will reinstall the OS while keeping programs, files and settigns in place.

If you have a factory preinstall or in-place Upgrade, these can be greatly inferior installs which hamper Win7's native performance so I would consider Reinstalling Windows 7.

I would also uninstall Comodo and your AV, and use MS Security Essentials or Avast5 with the Windows 7 firewall which gives much better performance and solves a lot of problem we see here.

Hi! Thank God I could find a USB mouse. But the strange thing is after plugging it, it would behave the same as the touchpad. I disabled the touchpad and then the mouse started behaving correctly. I turned on again the touchpad and it is now partially working (right button doesn't work at all). I also noticed that sometimes, some keys of the keyboard won't work, like the windows key. For example, I have my task bar hidden, and, in those cases, when I press the windows key, the taskbar will appear but the start menu won't. Usually, 1 minute later it will start working again.

Malware Bytes and Scannow (I used "verifyonly") couldn't anything abnormal. I tried using Dell Diagnostics, which will test everything, but it couldn't only test some devices like video card, hd, cd rom and a bit of the memories because I didn't had the utility partition ready. I was planning to test the touchpad and the keyboard.

I never uninstalled touchpad driver through start menu or control panel. As I didn't had a mouse atm, I went directly to device manager to uninstall it from there. At reboot, Windows installed it again. Nothing worked. I then uninstalled the driver again and "said" to delete it, so it wouldn't install it again at reboot. It didn't worked too. I'm currently only using Windows standard driver.
And sometimes, the USB mouse behavior is affected, as I said, by the strange touchpad behavior. How can that be?

Until I'm absolutely sure it is not a hardware malfunction, I will not attempt a system repair or even a reinstall, as the last repair attempt went so badly (dell factory recovery partition as well the repair cd were corrupt) that I had to reinstall everything, downloading the OS from the internet. This was 2 weeks ago. The reason for the repairing was a BSOD by an unknown cause, which was later discovered to be ZoneAlarm firewall. I changed to Comodo then. Avira is just a temporary antivirus, as I have an one year license from McAffe.

If nothing gets better until Monday, which probably won't, I will call Dell international services and discuss what can be done.
In the mean time, I might try older restore points

Thank you for your help

Looks like you need a little more time to read over my post.

gregrocker said:

Looks like you need a little more time to read over my post.

Which part? About the repair install? I may try that one, but I usually don't have any luck with system repairs.

Repair Install reinstalls the OS while keeping the programs, files and settings in place.

If you have SP1 already installed, you'll have to uninstall it to use the pre-SP1 installer to do the Repair Install, or wait until Win7 installation DVD's with SP1 become available.