Mouse click not working consistently
 

Sold my friend a laptop last month and he brought it back to me with an obscure problem. Touchpad is functional but neither "mouse" click button works. USB mouse *mostly* works. On a clean boot, I can left and right click desktop icons and open menus, but once I open a window or two they stop working. Same results with different mice, also tested with a live distro (Parted Magic) and my Windows 7 install drive.

Laptop is an old HP DV9000 running Arch x64 with Mate DE.

in that case it is most probably hardware related. Maybe the motherboard....

Since the buttons on the touchpad behave the same as the buttons on a USB mouse, it is most probably driver related.

Sound like the touchpad on my hp stream 11. Using the click of the touchpad put it in an odd state relative to the X session. Using kernels >= 3.19 fixed the issue so driver related. Most of which has been backported to debian jessie (3.16.x) or newer since mid-2015. Up until the fix, if you never used the touchpad and only used an external mouse everything was fine. But once you clicked the touchpad you basically had to reboot to recover. All fixed with 3.19.x+ kernel versions. When that laptop was new, 3.18 was the highest available kernel version (late 2014).