Accessing built-in pointer/touchpad settings

On my Latitude E7440, I have been having some strange problems with the built-in mouse buttons (Left only so far), but primarily in accessing my settings. This is a brand new laptop, clean install of Windows 8.1. I verified that my drivers are up to date, and the Device Manager says that the Touchpad is working properly. Here are some of the problems I am having: 1) From the Desktop Taskbar, I see the Dell Touchpad icon displayed, and when I right click to get the context menu, I see three items including "Touchpad Properties" -- when I select that one, I see the cursor turn into the "busy circle" for a second, but then nothing else happens. If I select "About" I do get the Version Information window, with "Dell Touchpad Driver Version 16.6.4.13" 2) If I go to Control Panel and select "Change Mouse Settings", I do get the tabbed dialog, but with some puzzling behavior for me: 2.1) Dell Touchpad tab -- when I click left mouse button on "Click to change DellTouchpad Settings", or if I click on the large Touchpad icon in the middle of the dialog, I again get the circular "I'm busy doing something" cursor, but nothing happens 2.2) In the "Buttons" tab, no matter what speed I set the Double-click speed to, and no matter how slow or fast I double-click, I have yet to see the folder icon open or close -- which makes me thing that my double-click doesn't work at all. Indeed, when I double-click folders (and I do have them set to open on double-click, which is the default), they do not open. I almost think that at some point that did work, or maybe still does under some circumstances, but I am not sure. For example, just now I thought I had double-clicked to select a word and it worked, but I can't swear to it, because it isn't working now, and I wasn't thinking about it prior to doing it. Aha! I just caught it! After manually selecting all of the text in this post, and then de-selecting, I could double-click to select a word! And now, trying again, it doesn't work. I just repeated the process, and it worked again! Until I started typing. And now, I have trouble even selecting text at all using the pointer. I think it is because the left mouse button wasn't bringing the cursor to where I am in the text -- then just now, I was able to select a word, but not by double-clicking, but then I couldn't de-select using the pointer. This is a very complex behavior!!! 2.3) Under "Hardware" I see the notification that the device is working properly 3) It seems like the left mouse button _sometimes_ doesn't work. This has been very hard to quantify or prove or diagnose. 4) Similar to above, sometimes vertical scroll bars respond to the pointer, in fact more times than not, other times they do not respond