Comment 14 for bug 463735

I have fought with this and now can tell you the once and for all fix. You can't fix this with GUI menus and such, but this is a definite, lead pipe guaranteed fix if you are willing to do some file editing.

1. As in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/463735/comments/11, fiddle with synclient to find out what changes you like. (synclient -l to display, synclient VAR=setting to set).

2. Write those settings into the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

For example, here are my settings.
<pre>
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Option "SHMConfig" "on"
        Option "JumpyCursorThreshold" "150"
        Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
        Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinW" "5"
        Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" "40"
        Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
        Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
        Option "VertScrollDelta" "100"
        Option "HorizScrollDelta" "100"
        Option "CircScrollTrigger" "3"
        Option "MinSpeed" "0.3"
        Option "MaxSpeed" "0.6"
EndSection
</pre>

3. Prevent your desktop from changing those settings. XFCE leaves those settings alone, that was how I first figured out they work.

BUT gnome will not leave them alone. Gnome tries to re-set the way it thinks you want, and this work is done by gnome-settings-daemon. It will try to put back in whatever settings youget when you do the menu System/Personal/Mouse to config the touchpad. We need to prevent that from overriding the settings in the synaptics.conf file.

Run "gconf-editor" and navigate to /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/mouse and UNCHECK active.

Log out, log in. Voila. Long standing problem solved. Whew. I searched for this fix for a months.

If you run KDE, I don't know what you have to do to fix this.

Oh, there is one other change I made, but I think it ends up being irrelevant.

Many people are plagued by this hassle, and they have many descriptions of it. Some think it is a flaw in the Xserver, others see it as a configuration of the startup process, some see it as a mouse configuator problem. Some people noticed that in the X log, it sometimes appears as if the touchpad driver is loaded twice, and people were guessing that was causing the problem that settings in 50-synaptics.conf were ignored. Some people suggested commenting out lines in the file:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

They say do this:

#Section "InputClass"
# Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
# MatchIsTouchpad "on"
# MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
# Driver "evdev"
#EndSection

I did it, and forgot about it. It had no effect as far as I could see. I've been studying the X startup files and I don't see any benefit from this. But it is still that way in my system.

I hope this helps you fix yours :)

PJ