Left Mouse sometimes stops working after Sleep

I have a laptop (HP EliteBook) with the latest Ubuntu (14.04 Desktop 64 bit) installed. When I close the lid it goes into sleep mode. When I wake it up again, the left mouse button regularily stops working. It does not happen all the time and there was no common reason I found apart from sleep mode.

The Left Mouse Button of the touchpad as well as the Left Click of the TrackPoint mouse stop working, and the touch screen does not react to the left mouse button as well. I can move the mouse cursor and right-click properly.

I found several "solutions" restarting drivers with modprobe, but none of them seem to work. I couldn't find anything in logs (or I just don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for). Is there anything I could try or look for?

3 Answers

Reinstall the device driver package:

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove xserver-xorg-input-mouse && sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mouse

Then reboot.

For Ubuntu 12.04, it may be necessary to reinstall the xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse package too.

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse && sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

Restarting the touchpad driver solved the issue in my case.

To remove the touchpad module from the linux kernel (basically stopping), run:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse

To add it back to the kernel, run:

sudo modprobe psmouse

HP laptops may have a touch lock option. To unlock the touchpad, press AltCaps LockI don't think it's an Ubuntu issue.