I have reinstalled Xubuntu from the Xubuntu iso and it seems to be working fine.

The thing that bugged me the most though was that the touchpad on my vaio laptop was set up for “tapping” by default.

Tapping is something that people either love or hate, and I am in the latter category.

Gnome seems to have the ability to control the touchpad installed by default but Xubuntu uses Xfce rather than Gnome so there are a few tweaks needed to control the touchpad.

A good link is at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad

I followed the instructions to enable SHMConfig by typing:

gksudo mousepad /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

I then pasted the following text into the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
  <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

Then I installed the qsynaptics package using the following command:

sudo aptitude install qsynaptics

After doing this I got a new icon showing in the xfce settings manager that gave me control of the touchpad settings.