Dell Vostro 3560 TouchPad works but buttons don't, TouchPad tap to click and two finger tap to right click stopped working

Dear Support,

I have a Dell VOSTRO 3560 laptop that has an Elan Tech SmartPad touchpad. I like its responsiveness very much.

Unfortunately, I recently spilled a bit of coffee and some of that went under the touch pad left and right buttons. The buttons stopped functioning but the touch pad itself is still very good.

Even before the spill I rarely used the buttons. I always used the touch pad to tap to click and two finger tap to right-click.
Strangely though, after the spill when the hardware buttons stopped working, the tapping on the touch pad also stopped working.
I made sure that the touch pad still can do tap clicking by uninstalling the Dell TouchPad driver and reverting to the Microsoft Mouse PS2 driver. In that case I can use the tap to click feature but only for 1 finger tap. I do not get any other feature as the driver is the simple generic MS one.

My question is would it be possible to still use the Elan tech provided (Dell TouchPad) driver and somehow configure it to accept the tap to click and two finger tap to right-click? This in addition to all the remaining scrolling and gesture support that the driver implements? I tried all the Dell Touchpad settings applet but nothing changed. Perhaps a registry value setting in the section for the elantech?

What seems to be happening now is that the driver is doing some hardware diagnostics, determining that the hardware buttons left and right are not working, and consequently completely disabling left and right click commands, even those that originate in tapping the touch pad.

Also I would like to add that at one point I connected an external keyboard that has a touchpad and I noticed that while using that keyboard's touch pad, the Elan/Dell TouchPad 1 finger and two finger taps also started working. This continued until I restrated the laptop. After that I couldn't reproduce the same situation. But to me this was a sure indication that we have a software issue that can be adjusted to get the tapping to work again with the Elan/Dell TouchPad driver.

P.S. I have Windows 10 Anniverssary Edition installed. I also tested by booting into Ubuntu Linux but the latter doesn't have native support for the Elan/Dell TouchPad it seems.

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Roger