Comment 73 for bug 565543

I seem to have a similar problem. I am using a Dell Vostro 1510 Laptop and am running Ubuntu 10.04. My touchpad used to work sporadically, meaning it would usually take several restarts for the touchpad to work in any way at all. Then it would work as a mouse with vertical scrolling, but not more. Else it would not work at all, leaving unable to even move the cursor.
Today it stopped working alltogether and wont load at all. I don't even have it recognized as a PS2 Mouse.

"sudo tpconfig" get's me:
>Found Synaptics Touchpad.
>Firmware: 8.96 (multiple-byte mode).

So apparently the system knows it's there, but it does not work. There is no touchpad tab in the system>preferences>mouse either. I am fairly new to linux, so I don't know what more info I could offer.