Touchpad/keyboard not working until battery removed on Aspire 3502

A friend ask me to look at her laptop as the touchpad/keyboard stopped working. I plugged in a USB mouse and keyboard and noticed they work perfectly. I then noticed that it hadn't finished loading up and the CPU was at 60% usage. The CPU hog is SYSTEM (236k) in task manager. The REALLY strange thing is if I remove the battery the system then continues to starts and the touchpad/keyboard work fine. I can then plug the battery back in when the system as started fully and all seems fine. I have contacted Acer support via email but am unsure how long and if they will get back to me. Has anybody any ideas. For the meen time I have set the laptop th hibernate instead of shut down as this bypasses whatever is causing the problem on startup. The machine has f secure A/V and mcaffee internet security the only thing loading on startup is AOL (urghhh), USB Voyager ADSL, F Secure, SIS keyboard/power hooks, Thanks

 

This is an increasinly common fault with this model. It is (strangley enough) a fault with the battery drawing too much power from the mainboard. Acer should send you out a new battery to fix this. Hope this helps