Acer Aspire 3054WXCI (Aspire 3050) keyboard and touchpad unresponsive?

Please for the love of God help me! My Acer laptop's keyboard and touchpad do not work.

At startup if it asks if I'd like to cancel system check it does not register a key press, however I have noticed that when it boots up and enters the OS (Windows XP Service pack 2) I have a small window during which they do work. If I open notepad really quickly with a touchpad that only just works (very sticky and jolty) and rap out a few keys it works okay, however they very soon stop responding. I have plugged in an external mouse and uninstalled the driver for the keyboard and then rebooted (the laptop asks that I reboot twice in a row, once to remove and once to reinstall the driver) the driver reinstalls automatically and then it seems to work just fine, touchpad included - the only problem is that it seems to revert to being broken as soon as I turn it off and then on again, and just recently the the task of uninstalling and reinstalling doesn't even seem to fix it. Even if it did there is no way I'm going to go through all that effort each and every time I want to use my laptop!

Other issues I've noted that might be related:

When the mouse and touchpad aren't working it takes insanely long to shutdown ... I'm talking a good 5 to 10 minutes here but when they are it shuts down quickly and easily. Also when they aren't working the laptop indicates that my battery is fully charged, however when they do work the battey always shows "1%" charged no matter how long I leave it charging.

I have read elsewhere that the problem can be resolved by removing the battery and running on AC only and then disabling ACPI power (or something like that, please understand that although I know a fair amount about computers I'm not a technician) and while the laptop seems to work OK with the battery removed running on AC (although I've only tried this once and right now) I'm not sure how to alter the power settings as opening "Power Options" through control panel opens the woefully basic "Acer Empowering Technology - Acer ePower Management" screen which only allows me to do the most basic of things, namely Alarm actions, Loading Default settings, what the power, sleep, etc. buttons do and setting a password ... these things do not help me ... so while I've come fairly far through trial and error and following online instructions I just need someone to help me over the last hurdle (and maybe explain what the hell caused it to start disobeying my very lenient commands in the first place!)

Truly extreme sincere thanks beforehand to anyone that has any suggestions for me, I'd really like to get this fixed without having to pay anyone as it seems to be almost working again.