Trackpoint/Touchpad issues (and possibly keyboard) with R60

[Sable_X31]

I've been having problems with a brand-new R60. When cold booting, after the R60 has been unplugged and the battery removed for a couple of hours, either the touchpad, the trackpoint, or both, aren't working.

This only happens on a long cold boot; if you reboot or boot up again after 20 minutes downtime, the issue doesn't happen; everything works fine.

I know some people have problems with the wiring harness connector, but I don't think that's the problem. For one thing, the same connector is used for both sets of buttons: the ones for the trackpoint & the ones for the touchpad; but when only the trackpoint goes out, the buttons for the trackpoint (on the same cable as the touchpad) also go out, while the buttons for the touchpad still work. Plus the problem appears to be intermittent, but reproducible.

Going into device manager shows the Ultranav present and without conflicts, using IRQ12. Opening the mouse applet in the control panel and selecting the Ultranav tab, the options for the inoperable part (pad or point) are greyed out. Attaching an external mouse will always allow that mouse to work correctly, but it does not activate the malfunctioning device; only rebooting does that.

This only happens with R60s (I have a few here). I also have a Z61m and a X41 Tablet with identical software packages (but of course different images), that don't have this problem. I also have heard from an associate at another organization, using a different software load, that they are having issues like this with their R60s, although their problem is just as often the keyboard as the mouse.

At the moment I am testing three possibilities, and decided to post this message while waiting the 2 hour downtime. For the first possibility (unlikely in my mind), I updated the Ultranav driver to the latest, although there is no mention of this issue in the revisions. For the second possibility, I updated the BIOS and EC to the latest versions, as I believe the EC was changed in regards to some keyboard problems. For the third possibility, I have imaged one R60 with a software load from another organization that uses R60s but hasn't been experiencing these problems (yet).

Have any of you heard of this exact issue? I tried searching, but none of the posts I read were a close match, or offered solutions which I have already ruled out as not solving the issue. Anyone have any other suggestions as to the culprit?

Thanks.

[Sable_X31]

It's always disappointing when you think you've found a major engineering flaw, and it turns out to just be an outdated and malfunctioning driver.