Comment 55 for bug 47971

I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 running Fedora Core 6.
The following disabled my touchpad.

Add to the xorg.conf file (found in /etc/X11):

          Option "SHMConfig" "on"
          Option "TouchpadOff" "1"

and restart computer (or the X server).
I found this reading all the above postings plus:
man synaptics
and
man synclient

Good Luck!