Dell Inspiron 2100/Sarge: pointer periodically goes nuts

[Aaron Bingham <abingham@sfu.ca>]

Hello all,

I've been a happy woody user for a couple years now, but, after
installing several more recent programs from source, I decided it was
time to make the jump to sarge.

Now most things are running quite smoothly for me, but my mouse pointer
occasionally goes nuts, flying across the screen and randomly clicking
(or worse, drag-dropping) things.  I've already inadvertently removed
some packages when the wrong character sequence got droped on an xterm
running aptitude.

My machine is a Dell Inspiron 2100, which has a Synaptics TouchPad (PS/2
compatible) mouse substitute.

The bad behavior occurs mostly while draging, and the mouse seems to
prefer the general directions up and right, but it will occasionaly fly
to the left or downwards.

I'm running XFree86-4.  I originally configured the mouse as GlidePoint
on /dev/psaux, but later switched to play PS/2.  The behavior is the
same either way.  My kernel is a custom build of 2.4.22.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-- 

Aaron Bingham
abingham@sfu.ca