Whenever I go looking for that kind of thing I always finish up by doing a full scan of my computer. Costs nothing but gives you peace of mind, well worth the effort to set the scan in motion.

Thanks to each of you for responding! I had a computer tech come to my house & he said that the new mouse I bought did need some software installation (altho the box said it did not). He did that for me & I was right back in business. He also went through my installations & deleted some old & unnecessary ones & my computer is faster now. $37.50 & worth every penny to me! Thnx again...

found this info on other forums about a Dell latitude I will list all of the various ways that I saw; you can go to Control Panel > Mouse and select the Dell Touchpad tab. There should be a Device Select icon which will give you the option to turn off the touchpad and/or touchpad buttons. Alternatively, for those who want to turn off the pointing stick and/or pointing stick buttons, there are also options to disable or enable those. *Start-->Settings--Control Panel double-click mouse and there's an option there to disable the touchpad *"For all of you having trouble enabling or disabling the touchpad: Turn on or off the Fast Initialization button under hardware properties for the Touchpad. Fast Initialization = On, then reboot, you are now able to turn the touchpad On or Off from Mouse Properties Hope this helps, it was a PITA to figure out." *Just go to control pannel and double click on 'mouse'. There should then be a tab called 'Touch pad' and click on that. There should then be an option 'Tap off when typing' enable that and your problem should be solved. It also said that if you do not find those options there then it is possible your touchpad drivers are not installed which would allow you to make the changes. "If the control panel only shows things about a "mouse", the touchpad drivers are not installed. You could try www.synaptics.com for drivers." found this on the dell site *Customizing the Touch Pad and Track Stick You can use the Mouse Properties window to disable the touch pad and track stick or adjust their settings. Open the Control Panel, and then click Mouse. For information about the Control Panel, see Windows Help and Support Center. In the Mouse Properties window: * Click the Device Select tab to disable the touch pad and track stick. * Click the Touch Pad tab to adjust touch pad and track stick settings. Click OK to save the settings and close the window. I hope out of those maybe something will work

Keyboard shortcuts for Windows Getting the most out of your Windows keyboard for example you said you were having to power off the pc by using the button, have you tried this keyboard shortcut method to do that rather than use the button? CTRL+ESC: Opens the Start menu (use the ARROW keys to select an item)you would then select to turn off also if you have a keyboard that has the windows key on it there are many shortcuts that utilize it.To turn off a pc that has the windows key(looks like the flying window next to the Ctrl) you would press windows key and then press U to get the turn off menu, press U again on a laptop to turn it off, or on a desktop press S to turn it off. Ctrl+Esc, U, Enter: Shutdown Windows (XP and earlier) Are you using a mouse that plugs into a usb port? If so try plugging it into a different usb port. for more shortcuts just google keyboard shortcuts here is another good one Computer keyboard shortcut keys if you use firefox there is a list of them also for firefox. I always also create a shutdown shortcut on my desktop for emergency use it is quite useful to have. Shutdown Shortcut  one-click turn off computer