Originally Posted by LetsPlayYourWay

You know that thing called the control panel? Turn off hotkeys and turn off User Access Control, this will stop vista from asking/telling you what to do.

Also what brand laptop is it? If it is one of the major brand ones, get a real mouse and then turn off the touchpad by pressing the Fn key and one of the F keys at the top, it should have a little touchpad logo on it. (This problem is not Vista specific, rather one found with all touchpads)

Now to get the look and feel of XP, you will loose Aero(if you have Vista premium, press the Windows key+Tab to switch between windows while still seeing the contents) Right click on your desk top and click on > Personalize. Now in this window select the top option "Window Color and Appearance Settings" and in the next window > Select "Windows Standard".

Then

Right click on the Start Button > Properties > Start Menu Tab(Top of properties window)> Classic Start Menu.

Vista should now act like windows XP

But if it doesn't see the following:

A lot of companies including HP,Acer,Dell,Compaq, Gateway etc load a lot of "automation" utilities when they install them, these will be things like HOT KEYS and popup "hints" etc. You can disable them by going to Start>Run>type "msconfig" withou the quotes > Select the Startup tab at the top and uncheck anything you don't want loading.

Don't disable all of the things that have "Toshiba" Or "Dell" in the title just because they do, check that they are not part of the hardware drivers.