I've got an Inspiron 8000 doing the same!  It appears that it is a possible hardware failure of the keyboard pointing stick and/or touchpad.  A quick fix is to turn OFF the touchpad in the BIOS and use an external mouse.  As evidenced by the FAQ, I would expect tha this issue has been quite troublesome for a large number of laptop owners.

Message Edited by Kojak on 10-11-2003 09:31 AM

Upon boot-up hit F2 key, (when the dell splash screen appears, but before the windows splash screen). At least thats how one enters BIOS on an I8000.

fanoblack

Probably a five star rating because of a such a widespread and premature failure of hardware.

Anytime. Glad it worked for you, I have heard of that option not curing the problem in some instances.

fanoblack

As a better explanation of what Bob is trying to say:  Not sure if this works with your version of Windows, but it works for 95, 98, ME and Win2K.  Click on the Start menu at the lower left of the screen, then scroll up to "Settings."  Move the cursor to "Control Panel."  Click it and it will open a window.  Click on the Mouse icon.  Either in the babs or on that first page you'll see a section labeled "Double click speed."

I have the same problem on my Inspiron 2500.  And no, playing with the mouse settings doesn't work for this computer.  One day I started the computer and lost functions on the whole keyboard, although the mouse worked.  I had to reset the system defaults to get the keyboard back, and that's when my mouse problem started.  Now I have to continually move the mouse cursor to keep it below my line of text.  Typing any word with the letters "ou" in it seems to "activate" the mouse, making the cursor jump from the text line to wherever the mouse cursor is sitting.  Heaven forbid I leave the mouse cursor sitting over the "Send" button while trying to write an email.  Imagine going along at 90 words per minute, then having to come to a complete stop and carefully click out every word with "ou" in it as you type?  Yeah, great fun.  No, it's not my palm hitting the touchpad or buttons.  Already tested that. 

Ideas, Bob?

Not exactly a cure but an experiment. Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the input drivers? You might, just to see if that cures anything. I don't know if the I2500 have dual inputs (a touch pad and an stick mouse on keyboard), but if they do, can you disable one and see if that helps. Try disabling each one. After that you might just need to turn down the sensitivity of the touchpad. I am out of ideas.

fanoblack

I just tried to find a new driver.  Windows elected to install a driver 2 years older than the existing one (go figure).  Good news:  In stripping it out, I reinstalled the synaptic driver from the Dell software bundle.  The problem hasn't repeated since.  *crossing fingers*