How can I shut off the auto-click feature of the touchpad on my Sony Vaio?

Ahhh, my new Toshiba laptop does this too, and I haven't been able to figure out how to turn it off. It seems like it mostly happens in the corners - if I click in the upper left, it opens the "file" menu. Very irritating. I realize this isn't helpful, but I hope someone else is!

Is there any general touchpad drivers for Windows which does things like turning the trackpad off while the keyboard is in use (an OS X feature, but so far unreplicable on Windows)?

On every PC portable I've every owned, there has been a physical button next to the trackpad which disabled it. For my current laptop (a Compaq) the touchpad driver placed an icon in the tray. Right-clicking that icon brings up a popup menu, and one of the choices is whether to enable "tap to click". That driver is from a company named "Synaptics", who appear to be the OEM source for the touchpad Compaq used.

bwilms, unfortuantely, shutting off the auto-click function doesn't seem to be one of the 'enhanced' functions. Thanks anyway though. There's plenty of other crap I could stand to update too. dpx.mfx, this might be the first thing you tried, but have you checked around in Mouse in the Control Panel? My touchpad can do obnoxious 'helpful' stuff like opening menus too but there's a way to disable it under the Functions tab under the Mouse options. Maybe your Toshiba has something similar.