This bug is indeed quite frustrating. I can consistently reproduce it on
my Latitude E6400 by using the pointing stick and touch pad
simultaneously. One might wonder why anyone would want to use both at
the same time, but when you use the pointing stick exclusively as I do,
it is simply unavoidable because the palm of my hand will occasionally
brush up against the touch pad. It's unfortunate that disabling the
touch pad has no effect, even though the touch pad does not respond to
input on its own when disabled. Something funky must be going on at the
driver level.

I should mention that the patch that was posted by Matthew Chapman
(http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/991762) seems to
remedy the problem although I haven't really had a chance to test it
extensively. It's also inconvenient that it needs to be applied manually
every time a new kernel is released.

I wonder if it's possible to disable the touch pad completely at the
driver level for those of us how don't use it, and vice versa for the
pointing stick. It's obviously not the solution to the problem but it
might be useful as a temporary fix. I tried looking at the alps driver
source, and although I have some experience as a programmer, I find it
quite cryptic. If anyone can explain the changes that need to be made to
accomplish this then I would be grateful.

-- 
ALPS DualPoint Touchpad flaky performance
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/296610
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