I have installed gentoo on my toshiba, and for some reason my touchpad is so sensitive, I can breathe on it and have it click. How can I disable tapping, or better yet, adjust sensitivity to this? I have tried using the synaptics driver but it disabled my optical mouse. Any ideas anyone?

My xorg as it stands now (my optical mouse works fine)

33 Section "InputDevice"
34 # generated from data in "/etc/conf.d/gpm"
35 Identifier "Mouse0"
36 Driver "mouse"
37 Option "Protocol"
38 Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
39 Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
40 Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

I too have a toshiba, but it's running FC4. It looks like I'm using the synaptics driver. Both the touchpad and an optical trackball work on it. Here are the relevant parts of my xorg.conf file. Maybe with these options the synaptics driver will work with your optical mouse:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection

#from a different spot

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "LeftEdge" "120"
Option "RightEdge" "830"
Option "TopEdge" "120"
Option "BottomEdge" "650"
Option "FingerLow" "14"
Option "FingerHigh" "15"
Option "MaxTapMove" "110"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "20"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "20"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.3"
Option "MaxSpeed" "0.75"
EndSection

i have dealt a little with trying to disable keypad taps on windows systems with dell laptops. After spending sometime with dell i discovered that they cant really fix the tapping at all. That would suggest to me that the tapping is part of the keypad but i am not sure.
from looking at the synaptics driver i would think that setting MaxTapMove to "0" might help. But dont quote me on that. It just seems the logical choice.

I have switched my xorg to the info listed above. It works now. The tapping is delayed by a few tenths of a second, and the touchpad itself doesnt go fast enough for me , but I am thrilled this works now. It makes life so much easier.

Excellent - thanks everyone for providing the info needed to successfully resolve this issue and thanks kg4ysy for posting back with the followup

I have an acer aspire running FC5. can somebody tell me how to get the touchpad not to click on this machine? I have the same problem as the op. This one also has two buttons for clicking I would rather use them than tapping the touchpad since if im not careful just moving the mouse around I will acadently click on something I dont want.