Dave-H

According to Device Manager, the driver is using ETD.sys, and it is the version 15 one as substituted. ETDCtrl.exe is running, as is the "Elan Service", but there is no sign of a control panel. I will try again with the INF changes suggested. I added the semicolons because that's how it is in the working version 15 INF.

TouchpadSetup.exe still throws "I cannot find the Touchpad device", both before and after copying the ETD.sys and ETD.cat files from version 15.14.4.1. Running setup from the Elan folder after copying the files produces an installation with no control panel, and a tab in the Mouse Properties which is completely greyed out with no device entries. Device Manager says that the mouser is a "Samsung PS/2 Port Input Device" and says it's working properly. Forcing a driver update in Device Manager only offers "Samsung PS/2 Port Input Device" and installing that makes no difference.

I thought that having a control panel whose settings were actually remembered between sessions was quite a breakthrough! It doesn't appear to be talking to the driver though. Here's the original INF and my last attempt at modification. I commented out the two lines that seem to result in the basic non-functional driver being installed, and added lines to hopefully support ETD0108 mimicking the "ETD0B00" lines. Without those lines it doesn't install at all, although it goes through the motions. With those lines it installs as it does unmodified. I haven't yet tried adding ETD0108 lines matching the "ETD0B01" lines. I notice that although the package is version 4.9.0.0 the actual Elan driver is version 11.7.5.5, which may well be one of the ones I already tried, which I never got working even on 8.1. The one that did work on 8.1 was 15.14.4.1, a lot later. ETDOriginal.inf ETDModified.inf

OK, I uninstalled Asus Smart Gesture from 8.1, and tried installing this version, as is. Tellingly, running TouchpadSetup.exe produced "I cannot find the Touchpad device". However, running setup in the Elan folder did install, with interesting results. There is now a control panel, which is fully populated, and the settings can be changed, and appear to be remembered. However the changes are not reflected by any changes to the behaviour of the touchpad. The Mouse Properties window now has a "Touchpad" tab, which looks the same as before, with "Standard PS/2 Mouse" displayed as the device. "Options" is still greyed out and does not invoke the control panel. In Device Manager, the mouse is now a "Samsung PS/2 Port Input Device". I will uninstall it and add my touchpad to the INF file and try again. It does look more promising than many of the other drivers though, great find @jaclaz!

Yes, I'd already thought about that quite a while ago! The trackpad in my previous netbook is a much better one anyway, and if a physical swap were possible I would have done it by now! Sadly they are just too different for it to be feasible, although I could look around and see if there is another one I can buy for the present machine which will physically fit in and be a better hardware match for the readily available Elan or Synaptics drivers. I'm still convinced that Asus have customised my trackpad in some way so it will only work with their driver. I suspect it will be more trouble that it's worth though just to be able to keep XP on the machine!

OK, I thought we were perhaps getting to a point of diminishing returns here. Unless @jaclaz has something up his sleeve, I think it is time to call it a day on this, you can't win them all! @RainyShadow, thank you so much for all your help with this, it really is much appreciated, and even if we didn't get the result we wanted, I still learnt an awful lot from this. I've been through several problems like this with people on this forum over the years, and in most cases we did get a result in the end, but it's not always going to be possible. It's never for want of trying though, and you and jaclaz have been so helpful with this, no-one could have done more. I'm not going to put Windows 10 on the machine. It had Windows 10 on it when I acquired it, I assume an update from Windows 8.1 which is what these machines were shipped with. It was crawlingly slow with Windows 10, which is why swapped the drives and went back to my old Windows 8.1/Windows XP dual boot from my previous netbook. I'm intending to try Windows Vista, if only because I should be able to update to it from Windows XP without having to do a clean install and have to rebuild the whole thing. Vista is also one of the only two domestic Microsoft operating systems that I have absolutely no experience of (the other being Windows ME!) so I thought it would be fun to have a play with it and see if it's really as bad as many people say. If it's truly awful I should again be able to update it to Windows 7 without too much problem. Thanks again! Cheers, Dave.

Just tried it again after running AsusTPHelper.exe. No difference I'm afraid.

OK, I disabled the Smart Gesture entry on the Windows Task Manager Start-up tab so the programs wouldn't load. I ran the batch file (as an administrator or it wouldn't write to the registry), and it appeared to run successfully, but no difference, the settings were still wrong. Incidentally that "windows.old" folder is a hangover from an OS update many years ago, I'd forgotten it was still there as it's hidden! It's gone now.

Is anyone else having a problem with Java 8 Update 251? I've done the update manually exactly as I have done many times since the installer stopped working on XP, and everything looked fine, the Java Control Panel says I'm up to date, and all its entries look fine, but the plugins are not working properly in my browsers. Both Firefox 52.9 ESR and IE8 appear to load the plugin, but no confirmation dialogue to run it comes up as it usually does, and no Java icon appears in the system tray as it usually does. I have a parallel installation on Windows 10 which works fine, and comparing the registry entries and files the XP installation appears to be exactly the same, but it doesn't work!

In XP or 8.1? If in 8.1 presumably I've got to kill all the Smart Gesture programs first?

OK, the report generated by InCtrl5 is attached. It was running in Windows XP compatibility mode, and yes, it was very slow! I told it artificially that the install had completed as of course it was never going to complete by itself. I hope if may provide some clues as to what AsusTPCenter.exe actually does! RPT_0000.HTM

Ah, that would explain it if that option is only in the Pro version of Revo Uninstaller! I have Process Monitor, but none of the otters. I will look into InCtrl5 and see if that will do the job.

Thanks again. I'm sure I'm being really stupid here, but how do you install a program using Revo Uninstaller? I can't see any such option. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in the help file either. Where exactly is it?

I installed Revo Uninstaller on 8.1, and ran the Asus Smart Gesture Launcher process (the only one listed for the program) from the Autorun Manager section. It said it wasn't running, so I assume it runs at startup and then closes when it's done its job. I'm not at all familiar with Revo Uninstaller, but I couldn't immediately see any other relevant options to start anything. The only thing is, I can't find any logs anywhere. Does Revo Uninstaller actually make logs itself, or were you referring to another log somewhere else?

Ah right. I've been looking and it doesn't seem to say anywhere that Asus Smart Gesture will work on Vista, I'll just have to hope for the best if I end up going there! I have found a graphics driver that will do the job I hope! I'm not sure how I can check AsusTPCenter.exe any more deeply, as far as I can see if it can't be made to run on XP that's the end of that line of attack anyway, at it certainly seems to be necessary to load the settings into the driver.

That's worrying, surely it doesn't need Windows 8 or 10! I was rather hoping that it would work on Vista if I end up going that way. The 6/0 6/0 6/0 entries in the files imply that it will work on Vista.

OK, I renamed dud.exe to dwmapi.dll, and put it in system32. Now I'm getting from AsusTPCenter.exe "The application failed to initiate properly (0x000007b). Click on OK to terminate the application."

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!