It was the firewall. Sorry to waste your time, but I appreciate your help.
I had to turn off the firewall and the wireless connections worked.
That didn't come to mind since everything worked fine for wired connections. I still haven't figured out which ports the router is using, I tried only allowing 53,101,and 42 but outgoing connections still didn't work.
And my mouse and trackpad are both working now.
For anyone else with a laptop, here is what I did on my Sony Vaio:
I downloaded and ran the synaptics rpm from here:
http://www.compass.com/synaptics/
It should add a startup script at /etc/init.d/touchpad that turns off tap clicking too (where it treats a tap on the trackpad itself as a mouseclick).
Secondly, I edited /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
(you need to have root privileges)
Mouse1 refers to my trackpad and Mouse0 is my USB mouse.
I added this line under the section ServerLayout:
InputDevice "Mouse0" "SendCoreEvents"
and here are my two configurations
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
##Driver "synaptics" (doesn't work)
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Name" "AutoDetect"
Option "Vendor" "AutoDetect"
EndSection