Hi, sorry if this isn't the right section for this, but I'm not sure how to classify this issue.

I installed Linux Mint 15 64-bit Mate edition on my Asus G73SW beside my existing Windows 8 system the other day. The installation went smoothly but after booting into Mint, I've found that sometimes I can only use the arrow keys to navigate a dialogue box (as clicking does nothing, as if the window were not selected as the "working" window). When I use alt+tab I can cycle through which window is on top, but still cannot interact with the window being shown. I have found that sometimes making clicks on a window registers on the window beneath it instead, for some reason.

This problem seems rather odd to me; I have never experienced anything like it. I tried booting a few different Live Linux distros (Fedora Gnome and KDE, Crunchbang, openSUSE gnome) and have confirmed that this problem happens in all of those environments as well. It does not occur in Windows, though.

Can anyone shed any light on what's happening here?

Thanks

"touch pad" issues are common on a notebook .
However it is normally a RHEL5 / 6 issue and not a Mint 15 ( well Ubuntu issue)

Mint or OpenSUSE 12.3 or even fedora 19 should have a working mouse pad

the touch pad "should" be working

have a look in the logs , like
/var/log/messages

The problem persists using either a touchpad or a mouse. I don't think it's a problem with the pointer itself, I can move the cursor around just fine. But when I have a window open that I can interact with (firefox, for example) I can't open the menu on the panel or click on anything else in the tray until I close the firefox window (which can only be achieved by using alt+F4, since the - + x buttons are inactive for some reason). I'm sorry if I'm not getting the proper idea across, this problem is rather hard to describe.

I didn't see and "messages" file in /var/log, might it be named something else? I'm a newbie and am not familiar with the linux filesystem