Mouse Touchpad failing to respond

Jagera

My laptop touchpad had just stopped responding. The keyboard is working ok.
I have done the following:
1. Rebooted from Live CD, it works fine from there.
2. Used a USB mouse, works OK, but this somehow renders the keyboard dead
3. I did a reinstall (keeping my /home folder in tact), no change, Touchpad still not responding.
4. I was going to try again to re-install, however now the Live CD is not booting up. I stops after about 6 dots on the casper/lunuz part, with the CPU fan going fairly hard at it.

In the messages log, all I can see that may be of interest are the following
amd64_edac: probe of 0000:00:18.2 failed with error -22
and
psmouse.c: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input/0 lost synchronization, throwing 4 bytes away

I've googled these & can't find anything concrete.

(linux mint 9)

any help appreciated

Jagera

Got it. Found a forum, which pointed to another forum which had the answer.

gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled -t boolean true