Compaq Presario cq56-11dx touchpad/usb mouse driver woes!

I'm working on a fix for my friend's laptop running Windows 7, and apparently the touchpad randomly stopped working for them, (and usb mouses won't work either).
I figured it was a driver issue, and it is; under device manager I'm getting a code 38 error for the touchpad's driver. Uninstalling the driver seemed like the easy solution, but it wasn't effective, nor was uninstalling, restarting, and installing the driver (as downloaded from the compaq website/wherever). I tried this in safe mode as well; the computer comes with some kind of nifty computer repair boot software from HP/compaq, and when using it the touchpad works perfectly, but it doesn't run inside Windows itself as far as I'm aware. When plugging in a usb mouse, Windows prompts that it's installing device software, and says it was successful, but it never starts working. Flash drives read just fine, though. I'm thinking this might be the result of some automated update which fudged up some things, either Windows update or their anti-virus (Kaspersky), but I'm not sure where to start (but I'm pretty certain it's not virus/spyware related). Thanks for reading up to here, if I was that girl from the Ring I'd totally crawl out of your monitor and blow you or something. Unfortunately the system restore points are limited to this week, and I don't have the Windows 7/driver cds that probably came with the laptop. Restores haven't worked so far, and there's a windows update but it's continually unsuccessful to install (more details later).

Is there a way to uninstall the shit out of a driver, or restore it to it's original state beyond what options there are in the hardware manager? I'd tinker harder at it, but there's little my googlefu does to help, and it's pretty frustrating to try lots of things with no mouse navigation.