Dave-H

I have tried to replicate this on XP. I used CFF Explorer to change the settings in AsusTPCenter.exe from 6/0 6/0 6/0 to 5/1 5/1 5/1. The first error I then got when AsusTPCenter.exe tried to run was that it couldn't find dwmapi.dll. I copied that across from 8.1. Now I'm getting "The procedure entry point _CxxFrameHandler3 could not be located in the dynamic link library msvcrt.dll". Where to from here?

OK, it appears that the driver settings will load with just AsusTPCenter.exe running. I've now got the other four program files disabled that were running in the background, I just closed them and renamed the files to disable them. If I put AsusTPCenter.exe into the registry "run" key in place of AsusTPLauncher.exe, which was there, when the system loads the settings are correct, and can be changed by editing the registry. That would be fine if it could be replicated on XP, but I'm not sure whether it will be possible to get AsusTPCenter.exe to run on XP, and that's assuming that it has no other dependencies of course.

Thanks for the tip, normally I much prefer the "Metro Boot Manager" though, I always thought the original text one was very ugly, even uglier than the XP one! It obviously does have its advantages though as I've just found out the hard way! If the programs are killed in Task Manager, the settings remain the same. I assume that means that once the settings have been sent to the driver, they remain active until a reboot. I will experiment to see what minimum combination of programs running at boot is necessary for that to happen. It may take a while!

I think the OS selection was screwed up because it partially loads 8.1 to display the choices, and if you then select XP the machine reboots into XP. If you select 8.1, or don't do anything, in which case it's set to happen automatically after five seconds, it goes on to the 8.1 login screen. I don't think it's a "f****d up setup" at all, that's the way it's supposed to work using the new-style fancy blue OS selection screen! The old monochrome text-based one might well have been OK in this scenario, as it wouldn't have pre-loaded some of 8.1. Anyway, I think I've proved what needed to be proved anyway, simply by disabling the Asus Smart Gesture entries in the Start-up tab of the 8.1 Task Manager. There are five sub-entries under the "Asus Smart Gesture Launcher" entry, AsusTPHelper.exe (which is listed twice although only one process of that name seems to be running), AsusTPCenter.exe, AsusTPLoader.exe, and AsusTPLauncher.exe. The last one does not appear as a running process. If I disable them from running at startup, all the touchpad settings changes are ignored, and it reverts to the default behaviour. Re-enabling them and rebooting returns things to normal. I think that proves that at least one of those programs needs to be running for settings changes to work, which is not good news of course!

Could you just clarify something? You said to use Autoruns to disable "all Asus programs and shell extensions". I couldn't see anything in Autoruns specifically about shell extensions, so I just did a search for "Asus" and disabled everything that it found. When I rebooted, I couldn't get into either operating system as the keyboard and mouse were completely dead, and the OS selection screen automatically ran 8.1 which I then couldn't log into! Attaching a USB keyboard made no difference. Eventually I had to keep aborting the start up until it went to the recovery options, and I could make it boot to XP, which was fine. So, I presume that disabling "all Asus programs" was not a good idea! Should I try again and this time only disable the programs that are specifically related to Smart Gesture, assuming I can identify them? I recovered the 8.1 registry using ERUNT in XP, so I'm back to where I was before now.

Ah right, I thought perhaps there was a problem with them installing on XP. There was a whole batch of Office 2010 updates from Microsoft Update late last year that weren't signed as usual, and the installations all failed. However versions individually downloaded from the MS Catalogue were fine. Glad these are still OK as well!

The debug versions that I use seem to be still fine, they all install and work on XP just as always.

FWIW, Java 8 Update 251 is now out!

"kbdclass" was the only entry before. "ATP" has been added above it. XP is still ignoring the settings from 8.1. Looking at the 8.1 Task Manager, there are four background programs running related to Smart Gesture. They are "Asus Smart Gesture Center", "Asus Smart Gesture Detector", Asus Smart Gesture Helper", and "Asus Smart Gesture Loader". I suspect that one (or more) of them is responsible for reading and implementing the settings. Without the necessary background program(s) running, the settings in the registry are not doing anything, and I'm pretty sure that none of those programs will be XP compatible.

No problem, glad it worked OK for you!

OK I've uninstalled the Elan driver from 8.1 and reinstalled the Asus Smart Gesture program, which is working fine. I exported the settings from HKCU\Software\Asus\Asus Smart Gesture, and I have imported them into XP. I'm not sure about the "ATP" registry entry you refer to though. Your reg file added a REG_MULTI_SZ entry called "UpperFilters" with a value of "ATP kdbclass". The two words appear on separate lines when the entry is expanded. The equivalent entry on Windows 8.1 is exactly the same. Should there be anything else there? The touchpad is working on XP, and AsusTP.sys is listed as one of the touchpad driver files, along with the usual two Microsoft files that are always there. In fact the Device Manager entries for the "Asus Touchpad" are all exactly the same on XP as they are on 8.1. The actual active settings are not being replicated between 8.1 and XP though.

No, I've not seen any "missing signature" messages. So, just to be sure, I now need to uninstall the Elan driver from 8.1, and reinstall Asus Smart Gesture? I already have version 4.0.12 so I can just reinstall that on 8.1, and then try just moving only its registry entries across to XP? We already know that the Asus Smart Gesture programs are not XP compatible so the control panel cannot be used.

Thanks for the optimism! Just for the record, the Dell control panel works fine in 8.1 to change the settings of the Elan driver, and they are remembered. ETDCtrl.exe and its helper program are running in the background. I'm not sure about copying the registry settings from 8.1 to XP as they stand, as at the moment I'm using the Elan driver on 8.1, not the Asus one. I think that would only be a valid test if I was still using the Asus Smart Gesture driver on 8.1, surely the Elan driver registry structure is likely to be completely different to the Asus one?

Don't worry, I get those "moments" all the time! My next line of attack had the registry restore not worked would have been to try a USB keyboard, I do have an ancient one tucked away. I probably should have tried that first in fact! I suspect what happened, as the keyboard and the touchpad are both PS/2, was that the PS/2 system somehow got completely disabled by my attempt to install the touchpad driver with a much later INF file. Anyway, where do we go from here? I am very grateful indeed for the contributions of @RainyShadow, but I can't see how getting the Asus driver file to install is going to help the fundamental problem of the non-availability of any settings. It will work of course with the Asus Smart Gesture software, but I see no prospect of getting any version of that working on XP. It is a help surely to finally have a working Elan driver on 8.1?

@RainyShadow Thanks for the new test file. The install batch file tries to make a folder called "16/04/2020" which fails as "/" can't be used in a folder name. Was that what you meant by "may fail due to regional settings"? I guess some date formats don't contain slashes. I've manually backed up that registry key anyway. I tried installing your modified version of the Asus driver, The touchpad is still working as before, and now says it's an "Asus Touchpad" in Device Manager, using AsusTP.sys. However, there still seems to be no way of changing any settings on it. The Dell control panel appears to work, but doesn't actually change the behaviour, and the changes are not remembered. @jaclaz I wasn't even aware that there was an on screen keyboard on Windows XP! How to you actually invoke it, I can't see any obvious option on the login screen? You can invoke it from the "Ease of Access" button on the 8.1 login screen, but there seems to be no equivalent on XP.

OK, panic over! I restored the XP registry using ERUNT in 8.1, and the keyboard came back to life. That program has saved my bacon so many times! I won't be trying that again! As an aside, my first attempt at recovery was to boot with the XP install disk, and do a System Restore from the repair options. Unfortunately, once the setup program had loaded all the files, and passed to the "Starting Windows" phase, it went to a BSOD (7B, inaccessible boot device). Ah ha I thought, that's because it needs the AHCI driver, and it will work if I change the SATA controller back to IDE. No, it still BSOD'd even in IDE mode. That's rather worrying, as it means I can't boot from the XP setup disk if I ever need to, but that's a problem for another thread!

Now I've got a bit of a problem! I tried installing 10.5.2.0 on XP using the INF file from 15.14.4.1, just to see what happened. The same thing happened, it looked as if it installed but nothing changed, even after a reboot. Then I did the same as I did on 8.1 and tried installing through Device Manager. I was offered the Elan Input Device driver, and it installed as it had done on 8.1, after the compatibility warning. I rebooted, and the keyboard had completely stopped working! So now I'm completely stuck, as I can't put my password in, even in Safe Mode, so I can't get into Windows XP at all! Any suggestions gratefully received!

OK, I will reinstall it and try that. However, I have had a major breakthrough with Windows 8.1, I've finally found an Elan driver that works with it! It's version 15.14.4.1, the latest version I've ever tried. It didn't install at all (although it said that it had) when I tried it normally, but forcing an install in Device Manager from the INF file actually worked, despite a warning from the driver that it wasn't designed for my hardware! The mouse is now an "Elan Input Touchpad". There is no control panel icon in the Windows Control Panel, but it can be accessed from the "Elan" tab on the Mouse Properties. The device is shown there as an "Elan Smart-Pad", which proves that the "Standard PS/2 Mouse" shown in the same place in XP means that the device had not been identified correctly. At least now I have an equivalent working driver in 8.1 to compare with what's happening in XP. Sadly there is of course no chance in hell of that driver actually working in XP.

Thanks. I had already tried transplanting the whole Smart Gesture installation from 8.1 to XP, but it didn't work. I'll give this a try though, you never know! Update: OK, it installed fine as usual, but the touchpad is dead. Device Manager now says it's an "Asus Touchpad" but it's showing error 39 "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing." So, I guess AsusTP.sys won't work on XP. Its parameters in CFF Explorer are 6/2, 6/2, 6/1, so if that is to be believed it won't work on anything less than Windows 8. I can try editing them, but I very much doubt if it will make any difference. This is pretty much what I got when I tried it before.

I wouldn't worry about being given loads of faulty updates by Microsoft Update, you should only be offered the one with the latest MSO.DLL in it (KB4484126). That is faulty, the one you will have to find manually on the Update Catalogue and install manually is KB4092483, which contains the last working MSO.DLL for XP, version 14.0.7214.5000. In fact, if you can unpack it, you only need to substitute the MSO.DLL file from it in Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Office14. If you do that, any other files that were in KB4484126 will be preserved.

Thanks! Yes, when I saw there was 11 updates for Office 2010 on Windows 10 this month I had a nasty feeling that there would be a bad one in there for XP! First time since the end of last summer though, so not too bad. I just replaced the "bad" MSO.DLL with the last working one (14.0.7214.5000) and all is well again.

That's already been tried, the drivers don't work on Windows 8.1 either. They perform exactly the same as they do on XP, the touchpad works, but there is no way to change its settings. I'm still convinced that the problem is not related to the operating system, it's related to the hardware. There just doesn't seem to be an Elan driver that works with this hardware, the only driver that does is the Asus Smart Gesture one, which cannot be made to work on XP. The latest Elan drivers may well work with it too of course, but they won't work on XP either.

Sorry, yes in that respect most of the drivers I've tried do "sort of work", in that the touchpad still functions, just as it does with the generic MS mouse driver. There are some drivers, including earlier ones I've tried recently, where it doesn't work at all, and the touchpad is dead, but it's OK with the later ones. What has never worked on this system, and is the real problem, is changing the settings of the touchpad. If I can't do that, I might as well use the generic MS PS/2 mouse driver, but I really do need to do that!

No, I haven't found any driver that works on XP with the present touchpad, with or without modding, that's the problem! The Asus Smart Gesture program works fine on Windows 8.1, but is not XP compatible.

There is no Elan driver on 8.1, only the Asus Smart Gesture program. I uninstalled the Elan driver which had been on 8.1 when I saw that it wasn't working any more (if you remember I just put the drive from the old machine into the new one). With 8.2.0.35 the result is pretty much as before, except that the Elan control panel shows no settings at all now. If I try to use the Dell control panel, the first thing is does is to swap the buttons over on the USB mouse, which really threw me until I worked out what was happening! It's one of its settings which comes up the wrong way around, and cannot be saved the other way around. It has always worked for some mouse functions, like button swapping (only on the mouse, not the touchpad) and pointer speed. None of the touchpad specific settings do anything though.