right on. It is either your palm touching the touch-pad or a virus. It is possible the touch pad has gone bad, but that is unlikely. You can always troubleshoot it by getting an external mouse and keyboard and seeing if it still does it.

Ah, I found my people! This was driving me crazy on my new Dell laptop. I couldn't type more than a few characters anywhere -- online text fields, email, Word docs -- without the cursor jumping back or up/down to another line. I looked up suggestions online and most recommended resetting the cursor pointer, which I did, but no change. Finally saw a suggestion about disabling the touchpad. Duh.

The new Dell has a much larger touchpad and I didn't even realize I was brushing it as I typed. There's supposed to be an option to disable the touchpad while typing, but I never found that. I also had a really hard time finding the touchpad properties file since it wasn't in the taskbar where it's supposed to be. Finally just did a file search on "touchpad" and found the .exe file. Saved that sucker as a taskbar shortcut. I almost exclusively use the mouse so ended up disabling the touchpad entirely. It can easily be re-enabled if needed.

Hope this helps someone; it was a bugger for me to figure out!