Dear Christopher, thank you for your prompt followup. I believe I caused the problem by installing the wrong version of xfce4 on top of ubuntu 12.04 when I did the reinstall. There is also some possibility that I corrupted the OS perl packages.
I have done a re-install. This time I installed 12.04. Then removed all the packages I did not want (gwibber, folks, zeitgeist, and various others) before I let the software update process run. Then I followed the process at: http://linuxaria.com/article/xfce-4-10-on-ubuntu-12-04?lang=en which has proved reliable in other ways. After this I installed perl, cpan for my user and so far so good. I have had a very good experience with ubuntu but I am going to return to debian and xfce4. The packages in ubuntu seem to be getting a bit intertwined and it is hard to get rid of packages you don't want and have them stay gone. I don't really know what gvfs is for example but I can't get rid of it. zeitgeist is anther hardy package that I have spent a lot of time purging and re-purging. It would be could if there was a stripped down release. Still I know it is a big job. Many thanks, J. E. Read -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X, which is subscribed to xorg in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/991707 Title: Mouse pointer (touchpad) gets stuck often To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/991707/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat Post to : ubuntu-x-swat@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
