Killing gnome-settings-daemon resolves the issue for me (pressing fn-f8 turns the touchpad on/off & shows on screen notice of it).
Killing it a second time turns of some features (including the discussed behaviour) and appearance settings (such as the Unity top bar).
After killing it twice and running it once the desired behaviour is retrieved.
I did not test the functionality further but it seems that gnome-settings-daemon is run more than once when I log-on.
Running ubuntu 11.10 which has been upgraded from previous versions (not a fresh install).
Killing gnome-settings- daemon resolves the issue for me (pressing fn-f8 turns the touchpad on/off & shows on screen notice of it).
Killing it a second time turns of some features (including the discussed behaviour) and appearance settings (such as the Unity top bar).
After killing it twice and running it once the desired behaviour is retrieved.
I did not test the functionality further but it seems that gnome-settings- daemon is run more than once when I log-on.
Running ubuntu 11.10 which has been upgraded from previous versions (not a fresh install).