Hi gollum1,
Welcome to the HP forum!
Thank you for your inquiry, I will do my best to assist you.
I understand you are having a difficulty with the touchscreen bar above the keypad. You can run MS Fix It to help resolve errors and look for updates. You should also run the HP Support Assistant to look for updates and resolve issues. If you have updated the driver you can try rolling back the driver in Device Manager. You also could try uninstalling it and reinstalling from the ordinal software from recovery. Using Recovery Manager to Restore Software and Drivers (Windows 7). if all of this has not resolved the issue,you should be able to go to the Control panel, under pointing devices and locate the touchbar. You should have an option to disable it from here.