Another thing anyone having a similar issue could do is to click on 'Smart Sense'. In this window you can disable the gestures you're unhappy with. You will be treated to little animations and also very brief descriptions as to what each gesture can do and how you are to execute the gesture if you would like it to work. That will bring you into a window labeled 'Properites for Synaptics ClickPad'. You mentioned that you went into control panel and then went to the synaptics icon and clicked on it. I'm not thoroughly positive if I understood the OP with respect to where exactly you looked. I actually prefer this to the touchpad.but I was also disappointed to see the shortcut in the top left corner disappear. The click pad is another laptop mouse pad except this time there are no left and right buttons at all because the entire pad clicks when you press on the bottom left or bottom right side of the pad. The touchpad also usually come with the standard two buttons at the bottom of the pad to be used for left and right clicking. A couple of years ago, I purchased a HP pavillion m6 (Don't recall the entire name), and just like the second poster mentioned, it did have a shortcut conveniently located in the upper left hand corner of the mouse pad. The Synaptics touchpad is your normal, everyday touchpad you are used to seeing on a lot of pc laptops like HP, Dell, etc. The touchpad and the click pad are two different things. This is using a Samsung np550p05-s05cl model, with Windows 8 and latest Synaptics drivers. Does anyone know where this shortcut comes from? Any way to disable? Any way to track the culprit and obliterate it from my laptop? I don't even know who is responsible for handling this shortcut, which brings me to ask this question here. Also in the control panel I don't see anything that looks like the culprit. I want to get rid of this shortcut, but I have looked for it in the Synaptics driver without finding anything like this. Simply tapping the touchpad with 3 fingers would deactivate it, and doing the same would activate the touchpad again. After like a month of yelling at the screen and looking for answers, I discovered this is a 'shortcut'. It was especially infuriating when this shortcut got accidentally pressed while playing games. This was unbelievably annoying, because at the beginning I didn't know what was happening or that this 3-finger tap was the actual shortcut for this. There's 'something' that handles a 3-finger tap in the touchpad and causes the touchpad to be enabled/disabled (buttons keep working). I have a problem with my laptop and the touchpad.

Windows 8 turn off touchpad