I hope you will pester Dell about this. I have a Precision M70 notebook from
Dell which has the same issue. Its touchpad / stick is made by Alps. No
Vista-compatible drivers have been made available.

I was elated to find an updated Vista driver for the Synaptic touchpad on
another notebook, but the ability to turn off tap-to-click was not included
in the driver!

The end result is that both of my notebooks are running Vista, and I have
had to turn off their touchpads in the BIOS and use USB mice.

Rant: It is REALLY stupid to make tap-to-click the default behavior. The
****ed touchpads already come with buttons. Hell, the one on the Dell has
FOUR buttons! There is no need to give me that many different ways to click
-- especially when, depending upon environmental issues like atmospheric
moisture content, the touchpad can become so sensitive that it "clicks" every
time you look at it!

"gliderdriver23" wrote:
[color=blue]
> I'm having a problem trying to turn off the tapping function of the touch pad
> in MS Vista... I have a Dell Inspiron 1715 laptop that was running MS XP and
> I just upgraded to MS Vista Home Premium Edition.
>
> I can't figure out how to turn of the "tapping" feature on the touch pad. It
> was easy on XP
> - control panel -mouse-divices -touch pad..and just turn it off. No such
> control can I find in Vista once you get to the mouse section under control
> panel. It drives me crazy...do I just have to live with this or is there a
> "switch" that I'm unaware of?[/color]