touchpad on V505, dual boot

Hi:
I have a new V505 machine with dual boot Redhat 7.3 and Win2K. I bought the 
system
with both preinstalled from a linux laptop company. I have had very erratic 
touchpad behavior
under linux - essentially the machine is unusable when this occurs since 
the cursor jumps all
over the screen in random ways, opening windows, moving panels, etc. It 
seems that the
problem always arises when I reboot into Linux after being in Win2000 
without completely
shutting down ( I can't yet rule it out in other scenarios). If I do a full 
power down from Win
and then do a hard restart to Linux, it does not seem to happen. Similarly, 
if I go Win ->
soft restart -> Linux (at which point the bug appears) I can get it to go 
away upon doing
a full shutdown (shutdown -h ) but not if I do an immediate restart 
(shutdown -r).

I assume that this means something gets loaded upon booting Win that does not
get cleared until the system power is completely shut down. I don't know if 
this means
there's a Win driver problem - I don't know what the system retains during 
soft restarts
that would be cleared upon hard restart (something at Bios level?). Any 
insight or advice about
this would be greatly appreciated.