Touchpad mouse drag lock

I enter this again to open a new thread as was suggested by Dell. The original entry was added into thread http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=latit_input&message.id=8727.

A short description about this drag lock issue in my case: Sometimes my D600 (with Win2000, Alps Touch Pad version 5.4.102.4, BIOS A5) when running Excel 2000 goes into a mode where Excel paints a cell area and there is no other way to exit than killing Excel from Task Manager. If I restart Excel, it continues to be in that drag lock mode. In this mode Excel accepts no keyboard input, not even ESC key, and does not respond to anything except resizing the painted area based on mouse movements. All other applications run normally, well, at least almost all (see below). I have the situation active in this laptop even now when I write this.

I noticed that once Excel has entered this weird mode, also Eclipse 3.0 (www.eclipse.org) behaves wrongly. I have had Eclipse to enter the same weird mouse mode even without Excel. All other Eclipse windows seem to work normally but the text editor does not accept cursor movement keyboard keys. For example, painting a piece of text with touchpad works OK. After hitting an arrow key the cursor shape stays as in the text editor even when it is moved outside the window. After switching to another application and then coming back to Eclipse window, the cursor shape behaves again normally. But not the arrow keys in the text window. The same applies as with Excel: restarting Eclipse does not change anything, but restarting the computer removes the problem, sometimes for days.

An earlier suggestion was to diable "Fast Initialization" from Alps Touchpad Driver properties in Device Manager. I have not tried that because it has side effects, which I like less than the occasional mouse drag lock.

Few questions: How can Windows and/or mouse driver remember the mode in which it was in the previously instance of the application? How the weird mouse mode propagates from Excel to Eclipse (and vice versa), which two are totally different applications and written using different software technologies? Does Excel and Eclipse utilize some rare functionality of the mouse driver because no other applications seem to get confused? Last but not least: How to get rid of this anomaly? To me it does not look like a case of broken hardware, I would advice Dell to inspect the latest touchpad driver carefully.

Leo