Hi, I have a DELL laptop with an ALPS touchpad/stick (the joystick in the middle of the keyboard) pointer device combination. Unfortunately, the stick is kind of broken and sends the cursor flying all over the place. Using the synaptics driver, I enabled (in hal configuration) yet the stick keeps on functioning.
As a workaround I was deleting the /dev/input/event7 file and restarting X. Unfortunately, the stick takes hardware priority : if it's moving the pointer, the touchpad gets disabled, so I ended up with a non-moving pointer and a disabled touchpad...
Using xorg-server-1.6 with HAL iput device detection, synaptics-1.1.0 under Archlinux.

heh, whaddaya know, I was here 2 days ago. Best "fix" I found was to run "xinput set-int-prop 4 "Device Enabled" 32 0" where 4 is the device id listed from "xinput --list"

Hi, thanks a bunch, stick disabled... and at first sight, it doesn't prevent the touchpad from functioning when going wacko. But maybe I was just lucky the last half hour...

I do find that each hibernate it comes back to life and such though, so YMMV.

Hi, I still get some touchpad-less moments, but a USB mouse works just fine. I'm still wondering though why it can't just be disabled without these workarounds (proprietary firmware issue maybe? :-D )

I don't use the synaptic driver at all, mine is just recognised by the kernel by default. I don't think any of this constitutes a workaround really though. The only more formal angle would be to tell HAL to ignore the device, I believe.