SO ... left the laptop alone for a few days and it healed itself, kind of. Without doing anything other than disabling the HID-compliant touchpad and rebooting, the touchpad now works for basic functions. It will move the cursor and click, but it will not do gestures. And if I check, Gestures are not available under Touchpad, which I attribute to the driver being Disabled.  I am NOT going to mess around with the driver right now, it is working and that is enough. At some point I will uninstall and re-install the driver, but that is for another time. So, SOLUTION, Disable the device under Device Manager->Human Interface Devices->HID-compliant touch pad->General.
I am pretty sure the touchpad on my system is bad so I want to replace it. My question is, is a 5590 touchpad the same as the 5587 ? If not, what is the correct part number for a 5587 ? (The cursor on my system keeps moving randomly around the screen, click on things randomly and making the system unusable. I disabled the touchpad  and connected a mouse and it appears to be working okay.  When I booted to Bios mode it still acts crazy, so I assume the touchpad was enabled in that mode.)    
Need G5 5597 touchpad replacement info