T43 Touchpad freezes & system hangs in Exceed SSH &

[Jason986]

Hello,

My T43 has developed a bit of a bad temperment when I try and use Exceed and SSH to connect to my campus network and run emacs via SSH. Every so often, when Exceed and SSH are open, and when emacs is loaded, my touchpad becomes disabled (but the trackpoint still works). At the same time, one of the services relating to the touchpad goes berserk and spikes to 100% CPU usage. If I can get to the TaskManager and successfully kill the process, then CPU use drops to ~3% and my touchpad works again (sans auto-scroll and other ultra-nav features). Note that this does not happen every time I use emacs (more like 1 in 3) and it seems to happen at random (in terms of what else the system is doing, whether I'm using battery or wireless, the amount of sun-spots that day, etc.).

Here's what I'm running:
The T43 listed in my sig with
Exceed Version 11.0.0.0
SSH Secure Shell Version 3.2.9
GNU Emacs 21.4.1
IBM Ultrnav Driver Version 7.5.17.18 (July 2005)

I would have thought this to be a driver bug, but according to IBM's support page, I've got the latest driver revision. Does anybody else have this problem or know of any solutions or workarounds?

[Jason986]

bump

Surely someone else has had this problem?

[christopher_wolf]

Hello there

Yup, I have similar things happen in Exceed; although it is slightly different for me. Everything works fine, until I go to scroll with the middle-scroll button. Then all the Trackpoint locks up and I can only use the Touchpad. I tried messing around in the XConfig file but it would still do that no matter what I did.

Still trying to figure out how to avoid that problem.

[johnchan]

yup same here, i try to use the middle button and then the trackpoint stops working

[Jason986]

Well, at least I know I'm not alone.

So the ruling school of thought is that this is an Exceed issue, or an IBM driver bug, or something else entirely?

I can live without the touchpad (grrr), but the lock-ups are driving me crazy.

[christopher_wolf]

I think I confirmed my thought that this isn't an IBM Driver bug from playing around with it; the problem seems to lie with windows and how it interprets the signals sent back from the Trackpoint control.

Namely; the problem seems to be with the Windows basic i8042 PS/2 mouse driver which tries to interpret signals from the trackpoint.

Going through regedit I found;

Code: Select all

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
	 System
	  CurrentControlSet
	   Enum
	    ACPI
	     IBM0057
	      <some more hex>
	       DeviceParameters
               [Mouse Related Info]

Now, Windows expects back a signal from which I *think* is derived from either their own mice or those of Logitech; but it doesn't get this back from the trackpoint driver. Interestingly enough, the Trackpoint driver sends back something that seems to be thought of as device resolution (for the trackpoint auto-calibrater system) and unintentionally tricking Windows into thinking the mouse is telling it "I don't have a third button" when this is clearly not the case.

The trick that has to be done now is to get Windows to ignore this; this can be accomplished through the Registry. Look for the keys named "MouseResolution",
"MouseDataQueueSize", etc. Add a new variable, value:3 type:dword, named "NumberOfButtons"

That should resolve this problem with Exceed and the trackpoint scroll button.

Why doesn't this happen in Windows itself? Because of the IBM UltraNav driver overlayed on the Synaptics touchpad driver. It catches what it is meant to catch; namely, the event code for the trackpoint scroll button which Windows couldn't deal with otherwise.

In all other cases, the Ultranav driver provides the correct function tagged to the trackpoint scroll button.

HTH

[xcoldricex]

i don't know if i did it right but the fix didn't seem to work for me :\

does anyone have the old drivers? it worked before i ran the ibm software updater

[xcoldricex]

i don't know if i did it right but the fix didn't seem to work for me :\

does anyone have the old drivers? it worked before i ran the ibm software updater