April 17, 2012 at 1:42 pm | blabbing.

I have been running into a problem more and more with my MacBook Pro. The trackpad is sticking and requiring a reboot to fix. There seems to be an issue with the external bluetooth mouse and the internal Trackpad. I have seen this all over the web and Apple has not fixed the issue. If anything it seems to have gotten worse over time.

My specific fix has been to turn off the Trackpad when the mouse is present and that seems to be working for now.

Goto: System Preferences – > Universal Access – > Mouse Trackpad -> Trackpad Options -> Ignore Built in Trackpad when Mouse or external Trackpad is present.

Update:
This fix took care of the problem for a short while but eventually the machine had other problems that needed to be addressed.

  • The trackpad problem turned out to be a an old battery that had inflated (Do batteries really do that?) and was pressing against the trackpad.
  • The external mouse problems that I thought were related were not. There was a corrupt files system. I needed to fully reinstall the OS and get my files back from a backup. Thank god for Time Machine..