Feedback on the Dell Inspiron 3135 - Mouspad issues.

Every once in awhile, after installing system updates, I get issues with the mousepad. It will stop functioning properly. After a full reinstall, the issues go away, but that is not a good solution for me. Using a USB mouse, usually, I can still use the mouse functions, but I've had a couple instances where even that does not work. This has been a problem for me with both Ubuntu versions 14.04 and 14.10 64-bit.

Generally the problem I experience is that the mouse will not move or the buttons will not click or both. Sometimes it will move or click intermittently, with no real explanation as to why it is not working. At first, I thought the mousepad was merely dirty, but cleaning it did not help the matter. When I installed Windows, the problem went away, but when I reinstall Ubuntu, the mousepad will work fine until I install updates. I haven't been able to discover which update causes the problem because several different updates have left me scratching my head on this one. I like having the latest updates for security reasons, but if I cannot keep my system stable, I may have to give up Ubuntu on this computer entirely. It seems a shame that such a small part of the computer should be such a huge problem.

If this is a known issue, is there a solution? And if it's not, are there drivers I can install to troubleshoot the problem?