Recently, my mouse has started to become hyper-sensitive (if that's even the word - and please, no "just give it more cheese" jokes ).

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop, witha touchpad mouse. Sometimes, when I'm moving the mouse cursor, it registers a double click, and randomly opens windows, programs, puts windows in the background, etc. - really whatever the mouse is over when it registers that double click.

This seems to be a new problem, really the last few weeks or so. I don't have this problem in Windows (dualboot), so I'd think it's a software issue.

So, I'd like to know, first, whether it really could be a software rather than a hardware issue?

If it is software, does anyone know how to try to fix this? I've tried modifying mouse sensitivity and double-click response time under preferences - all that good stuff - none of which works.

Thanks very much for any advice!!

Sounds like you probably have a synaptics touchpad.
You might like to look at:
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/index.html
http://qsynaptics.sourceforge.net/index.html

I've never used these (and no longer have to work with synaptics touchpads)
In the past I've configured touchpads using gpm with the '-r' switch.

Hi, thanks a lot for the response. Installing those programs seems a bit of a challenge for me now, being that I'm not Mr. Linux himself. Do you know of anyway offhand I can just disable the pad's doubleclicking ability itself?

I've tried to modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf by including Option "MaxTapTime" "0" but this doesn't seem to work at all.

Thanks very much!

No I'm not aware of any other way to achieve this.
You will find with Linux, that sometimes you do have to put a bit of effort in to fix strange problems.
After an initially steep learning curve, things do tend to get easier

Good luck.

There's a variety of ways to do it. The ones that I'm aware of are:

tpconfig --tapmode=0 --corner=0

Which one of those options that works depends on your kernel and touchpad device. Sometimes you have to make psmouse a module and load it later. I'm not to up on the particulars, but I did have to do that once. The other way is a kernel parameter.

mousedev.tap_time=0

For my grub menu.lst or grub.conf it looks like this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 ro mousedev.tap_time=0

There's probably a variety of other ways, some may work for you, some may not. Some may just be too much trouble to bother with.