Dell Inspiron 1555: Touchpad issues (right/left click not working and powering down....)

Dear all:

New to the forum.  Thanks in advance to anyone able to help.  I have two issues that seem to be related.  Today at some point I could not longer use my right or left click buttons on my laptop.  The touchpad still works in the sense that I can move my cursor and if I tap once on the touchpad (not the left/right buttons) then it will select a link.  There is no right-clicking capabilities on the touchpad itself.

I "attempted" to reinstall the driver.  Not sure if I was successful doing that, but seeing as how half of the touchpad functionality works, I'm not positive it's a driver issue.

After restarting my laptop I tried again to click on the left/right buttons and became frustrated and wanted to see if they were stuck, so I pressed down hard.  My laptop proceeded to shut off immediately.  Frustrated, I disassembled my laptop and checked out the touchpad sensor to see if I could spot something wrong.  Everything appeared to be in tact.  I reassembled and the laptop powered on, yeahh!!

I once again tried to press the buttons and nothing happening.  Again I pressed harder than normal and the laptop shut down.  I was going to disassemble it again however I got halfway before trying to power it on and the laptop powered on again.

My first issue is:  Why is my laptop suddenly shutting off when pressing hard on those buttons?

My second issue is:  How can I fix those buttons?  I have seen fixes on this site with tape and those shorts of things but the touchpad tape/wire appear to be fine.  Maybe not, I'm not an expert.

Another, perhaps related or not, issue is that I recently was struggling connecting to my wifi router.  We had a lot of people over on the weekend, many wireless devices attached to the router, so I thought maybe something was screwed up with the ip address.  When I disassembled my laptop, I checked the wlan adapter and made sure the connections were on tight.  I have had recent success with this, although it was only a short time ago that I checked the adapter.  Some of the issues regarding wireless were that the connection would drop from 54 mbps to 1 mbps, my distance was greatly reduced, and it would shut on/off intermittently with seemingly not logical explanation (moving around, etc.)

I'm almost wondering if my laptop fell sometime this past week and everything got a little messed up.

Thanks in advance for anyone who was willing to read this long-winded post and willing to respond!