My MSI Wind Laptop as a Synaptics mousepad, I have gotten Slackware 12.1 to detect it, but I rebooted and it stopped. It now seems to randomly switch between detecting it and not detecting it.
The first time I got it to work, I did a "cat /dev/psaux" and then it seemed to detect it as "/dev/input/event5" and "/dev/input/mouse0", the next time I rebooted it was automatically detected as event5/mouse0, the next time I rebooted it didn't detect at all and /dev/psaux didn't do anything. It now seems to be completely random, though I it does seem to work directly after hibernating Windows XP, but then I reboot and it doesn't anymore. Other than that it seems to randomly work.
Any ideas?

In SuSE during boot there is a line saying something like "...waiting for udev to settle". Might be it is the same technical procedure on your machine but no waiting, i.e. the mouse comes too fast. Do you have the means to insert a wait 3 after the start of udev in your init (?) scripts?