F9 key "toggle touchpad" does not work

I am running Xubuntu 15.04 on a brand new Asus UX303LN, in dual boot with Win8.1

Most things work well, but the Focal Tech touchpad has been a real problem.

Ideally, I would like to have the touchpad disable itself while typing, but I see no way of doing this...

The fn-F9 combination does not disable/enable the touchpad as it should. On Win8.1, this works perfectly.

When I use the settings, mouse & touchpad dialog, the touchpad is disabled if I uncheck the box.

The touchpad is ULTRA-sensitive, and the machine is unuseable fro typing with the pad active. Even the slightest contact sets the cursor jumping all over. It took me a long long time to type this!

Multi-touch does not seem to work, either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Bob

Here are some command outputs:

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PS/2 FocalTech FocalTech Touchpad in mouse emulation mode id=13 [slave pointer (2)]

# here I type the fn-F9 combination twice, then fn-F10 twice, fn-F11,fn-F12
# all but the fn-F9 work, darn! ....
$ acpi_listen
 PNP0C14:01 000000ff 00000000
 PNP0C14:01 000000ff 00000000
button/mute MUTE 00000080 00000000 K
button/mute MUTE 00000080 00000000 K
button/volumedown VOLDN 00000080 00000000 K
button/volumeup VOLUP 00000080 00000000 K

# here I have typed fn-F9 ONLY ONCE, but 2 events seem to be generated. I doubt that is the problem because this command line produces 2 events for any key I type.

$ xev | sed -n 's/^.*state \([0-9].*\), keycode *\([0-9]\+\) *\(.*\), .*$/keycode \2 = \3, state = \1/p'
keycode 36 = (keysym 0xff0d, Return), state = 0x0
keycode 199 = (keysym 0x1008ffa9, XF86TouchpadToggle), state = 0x0
keycode 199 = (keysym 0x1008ffa9, XF86TouchpadToggle), state = 0x0