Hi -- Brand-new member, so please excuse anything newbie-ish...!

I'm trying to milk the last bit out of a Dell Latitude PPX laptop. Recently, the "joystick" (mouse substitute, in the middle of the keyboard -- a little nub, meant to be moved with the index finger) has been stuck.

The cursor goes all the way to the top, or the bottom, or the right -- and stays there. I can send it back down with the joystick, but it travels right back. The problem was intermittent, but now is full-time. And it will change -- going from top to bottom, or whatever.

I've tried to figure out how to simply disable it, but I can't find the site on Control Panel/System/Device Manager. Is there some other way to overcome the problem? Disable it? Break it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

goto the control panel. double click system. click the hardware tab, then the device manager button. click the plus by mouse and other pointing devices(something like that) remove and re-install. if the problem persists, try updating the problem. if its a hardware issue, select repeat the above steps, except , right click the mouse, goto properties. at the bottom of this new windows, where is says device status, change it to disable.

Thanks for the advice. We will try it. That's similar to what we were doing before, but it might work if we try a full uninstall.

We tried the fix. Unfortunately, we're running Windows 2000 Professional, and it doesn't recognize the touch pad or the joystick -- just the driver for the external mouse. I tried uninstalling the latter, and it made no difference.

Is thgere some way to get in to disable just those two devics (joystick and touch pad)? I'd be happy to use the USB mouse as my only controller.

its def. listed in device manager somewhere, or else it would be working at all