Summary: perfectly good mousepad suddenly stops working, for no apparent reason. Probably going back to manufacturer, but I'd welcome suggestions or insight into cause. External mouse works fine

Detail:

Laptop: Acer Aspire 1692 WMLi
OS: Gentoo Linux dual boot with XP
Kernel: 2.6.15
Other Info: Broken on windows as well

Basically, I was browsing, and my touch pad was working fine. Then I can across this surreal flash game. It shows a clip of a cow trying to get into a spanish lady's house. Apparently you have to press "g" and "h" very fast, and the faster you type, the further in the cow gets.

Anyway, I messed around with that just long enough to figure out what was going on, and then end to do something else, and when I did the pad would't respond. It continued non-responsive in the face or reboots and even when I booted into XP.

The fact it broke under XP suggests a hardware problem. I suppose it could have been a loose connection that got rattled loose by my keyboard tapping, but I really wasn't hitting them that hard...

Anyone have any ideas?

definitely looks hardware issue. as a last resort just try booting up with latest knoppix to see if there is any life left in the mouse.

This was one of those aggravating problems that just went away for no good reason. Then it happened again, just the other day.

Turns out, the 1692 has a "disable the mousepad" hotkey. The solution was to boot into XP and use the key to re-enable the pad. I don't know how you'd go about it on a pure Linux machine tho'

Just in case anyone's having the same problem