Synaptic top 2 buttons + pointing stick stopped working + touchpad device settings tab disappeared

[Nomro]

My Synaptic touchpad top buttons + pointer stick are not working

Also the touchpad settings tab under the "Additional mouse options" disappeared. This happened after the laptop gave me a black screen and once I restarted, the touchpad issues started + wireless card issues, the later was resolved by simple microsoft diagnostic tool  run.

Actions taken to try to solve the issue with no joy: 

1- Update the driver to the latest one and restart

2- Rollback to older driver version and restart

3- Uninstall the touchpad driver from the device manager 

4- Multiple restarts to the PC

5- Played a bit with the registry yet no joy. 

Please advise any ideas ? 

[soccer_dan]

best thing to do is to run HP Image Assistant and update all drivers and firmware it suggest to update, then see if the problem goes away