T60, *both* left mouse buttons failed simultaneously

[Chris Thorne]

Now this is weird.

T60, recently upgraded from XP to the Win7 release candidate.

Left mouse buttons stopped working suddenly. Both of them. Uh, but wait a minute, aren't those on separate cables? Trackpoint mouse buttons on the keyboard cable, trackpad mouse buttons on the palmrest cable? Yes, that's the case.

Which would seem to indicate not a hardware failure but software. W7 is still somewhat flakey in my experience. I reinstalled drivers. Nothing.

Does my external Lenovo travel keyboard work? Yes.

Let's try booting Ubuntu. I have a 9.10a3 disk here.

Left mouse buttons are also dead in Ubuntu! Which means that perhaps my earlier idea about this being a Windows software failure may be wrong.

And, even more oddly, under Ubuntu, the left mouse buttons of my external Lenovo keyboard are ALSO dead.

Okay, maybe it is hardware. Let's have that palm rest off and re-seat both connectors. Doing so makes absolutely no difference.

Nosing around, I couldn't find anything in the forums here that described such an error, but I did find multiple instances of people at the Lenovo T-series user forums complaining of sudden left mouse button coma.

I wonder if it's possible for a component failure at the keyboard or palmrest level to cause such a cascading failure -- latching signal high on the mouse button line and not releasing, and masking further future inputs on the same button? The signals from the two different left buttons do ultimately go to the same place, so one wonky button could presumably take out both.

Grasping at straws, really, but that's all I have to grasp at.

Any ideas from those perhaps more clued in than I am?

[Chris Thorne]

Aha!

The idea of a chained or connected failure turns out to have been bang on the mark.

It is the palmrest trackpad unit at fault. Removing its ribbon connector allows the mouse button on the keyboard trackpoint to work properly. So the two sets of mouse buttons are NOT operationally and logically independent of the other set.

The trackpad mouse button isn't visibly wedged or damaged, so I'm assuming this is a logic level failure due to static electricity, or it's an internally chewed up ribbon cable.

Will report back once I've isolated the failure and fixed the problem for good.

[mfyr]

Hello,

have you isolated the failure and fixed the problem yet?
I have the same one.

greets from germany,
mfyr

[bloovis]

I'm a bit late to this party, but I just came across this same problem in a T60p that I recently purchased. After a few minutes of mousing around in Linux Mint 11 (either in Chrome or in gnome-terminal), the machine would behave as if the left mouse button had gotten stuck down: text would be highlighted as if selected and moving the mouse cursor around would increase or decrease the selection. No amount of pressing of both left mouse buttons or any other buttons would fix the problem, though logging out and back in would fix it for a few minutes. I also tried booting Mint 10 from a USB stick, and it would show the problem immediately (it behaved as if I had the left mouse button down and was trying select a rectangular area on the desktop), without my having to run any programs.

I found a posting somewhere (either in the user forums at lenovo.com or here on thinkpads.com -- can't find it now) that suggested disabling the trackpad in the BIOS, as an alternative to opening the machine and disconnecting the trackpad's ribbon cable. I did this, and it seems to be working fine after several hours of use. I dislike trackpads anyway, so this was no great loss.