HP Envy Sleekbook Clickpad Nightmare

I recently purchased the HP Envy Sleekbook 4t 1000, running Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit).

it's a wonderful machine with one big exception, the clickpad is almost unusable. Specifically, no matter what I try in adjusting the behavior of the clickpad through the Synaptics settings, it still has the unwanted behavior of making the cursor jump every time i try to left or right click at the bottom of the clickpad. I saw on HP's website that I should have a Synaptics driver version later than 15.something, and I checked and it is 16.0.2 so it's not that.

I've done some exploration of the conditions under which the jumping happens and have determined that, no matter what I do to use Synaptics' SmartSense setting to restrict the zone for pointing, that if I have my right finger in the pointing zone, that if I start inside the zone and pull my finger down, it will continue to move the pointer even when I leave the zone. The side effect of the software letting a finger that starts in the zone continue after leaving the zone is that, when my right finger is in the pionting zone and I place my left finger ont he clickpad outside that zone for a left mouse click, the clickpad interprets my left finger as a continuation of my right finger movement and moves the cursor as I click, causing a jumpiness that is infuriating and half the time results in a lack of click accuracy or the computer interpreting the click as an attempt to drag, causing the click to fail.

Now, I imagine that the folks at synaptics made it so that if I'm dragging downward with my finger, having starting in my pointing zone, that I'd want more real estate for a continuous drag and so lets me, if STARTING in the pointing zone, exit it at the bottom while still maintaining my drag of the pointer. And in theory that might be true. After all, the restricted pointing zone in SmartSense does not jump the cursor if I lift my right finger completely off the clickpad before doing my left click with my other finger. That is how I know the zone is working. But, the fact that it interprets my left finger touching outside the pointing zone as a continuation of my right finger in the pointing zone is absurd. Who lifts their one finger off the clickpad before touching it with their other finger? I've disable all multi-finger gestures and it's still a problem. Is this a configuration issue that I'm not doing properly or is this a limitation of the synaptics driver software?

Please help, I'm going crazy.

 

I don't know what causes it, but I've had the same issues with the Synaptics on my Envy 17-3D 3000. Both of the dv6 laptops (a 6xxx and a 7xxx) that I bought for my children have similar issues, too, if not quite so bad. Ironically, the cheap Acer Aspire Timeline U M5 I bought as a temporary fill in for a dead PC has a touchpad that works terrifically. Then again, Acer used an Elan pad on this notebook, so maybe it's just the nature of Synaptics in general, since that's the brand HP used on all three of the aforementioned laptops.

 

I may have partially solved this problem. One thing I did to try to fix it was to go to the Clicking options in the Synaptics configuration tab and, where you can configure One, Two and Three-Finger Click Action, I set Two-Finger Click Action to Disabled. It seems that when my right-hand finger was touching the clickpad pointing zone that no matter where my left-hand finger came down (on the bottom for a left click), it interpreted this somehow as a Two-Finger Click. Disabling that has gotten rid of most of the issue, though the mouse still jumps a bit as I play with the Sensitivity (light brushes of the clickpad surface as I lift my right-hand finger out of the way cause the cursor to jump while I'm trying to click with the left-hand finger.