T61 Virtual Scrolling freakout

[wondercow]

Since I got my T61 last summer, I have had intermittent problems with the virtual scrolling on the touchpad. I use the feature constantly, but occasionally it will freak out and scroll way, way down really fast. Sometimes this will happen when I am trying to scroll down a little bit, but sometimes I just have to lightly place my finger on the touchpad without any intent for scrolling and it will immediately start scrolling down. I have never had it scroll up or horizontally like this--just down.

When I was using Vista (shipped with the T61), this would become a big problem when, say, viewing 700 page pdf files because Vista would get the signal to scroll through the bottom and then I would have the option of sitting and watching it chug down through 700 pages for 10 minutes or holding down the power button and rebooting.

Due to my mounting frustrations with Vista, I recently formatted the hard drive and switched to Ubuntu Linux. While almost all of the Vista annoyances are gone, I still occasionally get the scrolling down freakout when I put my finger on the touchpad. Fortunately, when this happens it only scrolls down a page or two and then stops, so I can tolerate it and just scroll back up, but I would really rather this not happen at all.

Has anyone else experienced the touchpad virtual scrolling freakout I described? Because it is happening in both Vista and Ubuntu, I am speculating that this might be a hardware problem, but I don't really want to deal with tech support or mailing in my laptop if I can avoid it. Any ideas or similar experiences?

[suikoden2003]

that seems to be a common problem for touchpads because my friends HP and Dell laptops are doing that too.