Xorg mouse and touchpad problems - a possible solution.
 

There have been a considerable number of threads in recent months on problems with pointer input response under X. Particularly popular seems to be the scroll wheel or touchpad vertical scroll motion producing a scroll through Firefox's window history. It's not just Firefox though, I reproduced the fault in Konqueror before reading too deeply on mozilla bugs.

Some have seen a fix through edits to an Xorg.conf file but I like the idea of not having to delve into its secrets by just not having one so I looked for a more basic fix. Search a little and you will find several suggestions for HAL policy changes and I have used an edited 10-keymap.fdi file to get my keyboard layout recognised as english again. The other policy changes seemed to me to act by block the autodetect principle of HAL with a manual overide of the input device detection, this made me suddenly realise that some have had problems with KVM switches that add a hardware layer between mouse and machine.

Now I don't have a switch but the slackware 13 changes_and_hints file gives a fix for kvm problems :-
in /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf uncomment the line
#options psmouse proto=imps


So far this works for me, even if it is a case of RTFM. Hope this is of help to someone.

Dave

Slackware 13.0/KDE 4.3.3