Comment 217 for bug 1220426

nmahale, on further inspection, I think the scrolling problems I was seeing were caused by conflicting services.
The kde touchpad config manages the feature of disabling the touchpad during typing by installing a 'kded' service. This basically consists of a QTImer tied to keyboard events to enable/disable the synaptics touchpad. Meanwhile, syndaemon has a similar feature built in, which is enabled by default (at a 2sec delay). This is why I was still seeing the feature in effect after disabling it in the kde touchpad config dialog.
So, seems likely that there's a conflict between these two daemons. I've encountered no problems since disabling the kded service (relying solely on syndaemon).

However, even if two services were running... it seems like they'd both operate by trying to enable the touchpad after a fixed interval. There shouldn't be a problem with two services trying to re-activate the touchpad at the same time, right? Two services sending an activation signal at the same time shouldn't cause the activation to be lost. Maybe there's some problem there worth exploring, but it's undesirable to have redundant services anyway...