need to disable misfiring touchpoint [puppy 4]

[mainiac]

Apologies if I haven't searched for this extensively enough. The nature of my problem makes navigating graphical interfaces difficult, which makes searching a slow and frustrating process and means I wanted to make this post before the problem got worse.

My problem is that the touchpoint (i.e. "mouse-nub", "nubbin", "clit-mouse", "fucking useless little toggle on my goddamn keyboard that is always getting in the way", what ever you want to call it) on my laptop has started misfiring, sending a combination of random and steady movement signals. Naturally, this makes it rather difficult to click on stuff. I don't need the touchpoint, so I just want to disable the damn thing.

I have a mouse so the touchpad can be considered acceptable casualties if necessary. I would prefer not to do the hardware solution of cut the wire because I don't have tools available. My systems bios does not provide any means of disabling the touchpad so far as I can discern. The problem seems to be hardware, not driver, as my windows boot has the same behavior here.

The laptop in question is a Dell Inspiron 4000 Pentium 3 laptop of unknown birthdate.
I am running puppy 4.1. I use the Xorg graphical interface.
The piece of hardware is a TPPS/2 IBM Trackpoint. It's bus is 0x11 and it's connected to synaptics-pt/serio0/input0

I was thinking the best solution would be to disable the drivers, but I don't know how to do that and have difficulty searching for instructions.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give here.