Comment 7 for bug 341094

Resolution found.

Fedora/Redhat have run into this problem as well.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=490250

I added the following to the kopt setting in /boot/grub/menu.lst

i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop

and ran update-grub as root (or you can use sudo) in a terminal.

Viola! laptop boots and finds keyboard/mouse trackpad consistently.

Vostro Laptops still use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse internally, even though
they do not have external PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports. Since everything is permanently
connected, I bypassed all the detection carry on in case there are bugs there. Someone may want
to try each option(s) separately by themselves, and find the ones that really matter.