Ok sir, here's what I did. In the Smart Gesture, there is the option of checking off to disable the mousepad when an external mouse is plugged in or used as a wireless mouse. Checking it off did zero. Actually, I've tried that before but thought I'd do it again. But of course, it still had no positive effect. So I've gone to Control Panel to uninstall Asus Smart Gesture & I see a 'Repair' so I did just that, a repair. Upon rebooting the machine, the mousepad remains disabled. I can now enable it or disable it with the F9 and all seems to work flawlessly. One might say I made a mistake and did it right. At least you can use this for someone else who might wind up enjoying the same grief.