Any way to make the Alps touchpad better? (DV2500t)

After a long, sordid, love/hate relationship with my DV1000 CTO notebook ended due to multiple motherboard failures, I was finally issued a replacement DV2500t by a kind HP service rep.

I love the new look of the laptop, and appreciate the boost in processing power and other goodies that weren't available when I ordered my DV1000 a few years ago.

Unfortunately, aside from the whole SATA issue that will make "downgrading" to XP from Vista more difficult than necessary, I'm finding one other thing about this notebook to be quite annoying:

To be frank, the Alps touchpad and driver leave a lot to be desired. I'm really missing all the customization that I'd grown used to from the DV1000's Synaptics touchpad. I figured I'd give the Synaptics driver a shot to see if it would work, but aside from allowing me to assign left and right click buttons, it wouldn't let me do anything else (not even vertical or horizontal scrolling.)

On the old laptop, the Synaptics drivers allowed me to map all 4 corners of the touchpad to nearly anything I wanted, set it so my palms wouldn't accidentally register as a tap, etc. I take it that the drivers didn't work due to the touchpad being from a different manufacturer this time around.

My main question is this:
Is there anything I can do to make the touchpad more customizable than the Alps drivers will allow? In particular, I'd really like to be able to map ANYTHING (but preferably a corner of the touchpad) as a middle click button. I'm currently running Vista Home Premium 32bit but will eventually switch back to XP. If anyone knows of any drivers that would allow this on the Alps touchpad for either OS, please share. Not being able to middle click is driving me mad. The crippled Synaptics driver did allow me to set either the left or right button as a middle click, but then I lost the previous left or right click functionality, and not having the ability to scroll in either direction is too much of a loss.

 

I would love to know how to customize the 4 corners of the touchpad as well. =). Hope someone knows how to do this.

 

yeah, that would be cool, but i dont think its possible because most drivers are specific to a model

 

since we're on the topic of touchpads, does anybody have an issue when the tapping randomly turns off while watching flash videos? Its not that big of an issue, but it is annoying to have to go into control panel to reset the tap settings.