HP laptop keyboard/mouse "taps" not working

Gparted looks like great software,  I am happy to have found it and this forum.

I would rate myself as a noob in the linux world.  I have created a few linux VM's and play around with Backtrack stuff.  Other than that I am a long term windows user.  Looking to learn and change that somewhat.

I have downloaded the latest Gparted live CD, and confirmed my md5 is correct.  I burn bootable ISO's very often so I am familiar with the process.  When I launch the live CD it appears to go as expected.  The splash screen comes up showing the various pre-programmed icons along with the Gparted box in the middle of the screen.  All appears well, but not quite.

I can move the cursor using the mouse pad on the laptop but I cannot select any options using it.  Its as if the program is not recognizing any "mouse taps" and such.  I eventually abandon trying and have to pull the battery on my laptop to shutdown the system.  Not the greatest way to shut down.  I have considered going to a friend's house and getting on his desktop to see if there is any difference in performance.  Before I do that I thought it would be nice to mention my situation here in case someone else has dealt with this.  I tried a search for keyboard stuff but didn't see what I needed.  The flash devices (usb) don't appear to be seen during the initial boot but its tough to determine without the keyboard/mouse inputs being accepted.

Secondly, I wanted to mention my main reason for starting with Gparted.  I use WDE encryption on flash drive media and I want to "flip" the partition type bytes so that various windows machines won't keep nagging my users to format them.  TrueCrypt writes an 06 partition type on WDE flash media.  I have done some extensive reading and flipping the partition type bytes to 64 is supposed to stop those nags from happening.  I am concerned that my users will get careless and format a flash losing all the data.  Its backed up but would be a pain to deal with.  So, I am hoping that gparted and fdisk t will allow me to do the set id= operation on these flash drives.  I hope my intent is clear and would welcome any thoughts on the process/subject.