Left-click Misbehaving Both On Touchpad And Wired Optical Mouse?

I have a Dell XPS 14z which is about 11 months old. I have Windows 7. I am having trouble with left-clicking.I first noticed the problem while working in AutoCAD. I suddenly stopped being able to use my left-click button at all. I hit ctrl+S to save so that I could reboot, hoping the button would resume functioning when I restarted. Strangely left-click immediately started working again. Initially I only had this problem in AutoCAD. The semester ended and I stopped using AutoCAD. I was assuming that there was a problem with that program and planned to reinstall before the next (this) semester of school.Then, I started experiencing left-click problems while browsing the internet, I use Chrome. I do tend to open a lot of tabs at a time when I am running a search, don't know if this is relevant. Left-click sometimes would randomly stop working, sometimes it would just lag - click..... wait.... action long after expected, sometimes it would randomly also start working again. Sometimes when using the left button to drag a scroll bar in chrome it would "stick" (the function would stay on, the button did not appear to be physically stuck and this happens with mouse or touchpad) and moving the cursor away from the scroll bar would navigate the page up and down. The non functional left-click problem would also occur in Windows, when I would say attempt to go into device manager to see what was up.***I should also mention that when the left-click on the touch pad stops working double tapping the touchpad also stops working.***I have tried connecting a wired optical mouse - same issue occurs with the external mouse, though sometimes either the left-click on the mouse or touchpad will work while the other doesn't, both or neither will work playing with the mouse click settings, faster and slower double click - no luck updating the mouse and touchpad drivers - they report that they are up to date rolling back the drivers uninstalling the mouse going back to a restore point before the problem I saw one post which suggested that the display driver caused a similar problem, I have updated my display drivers I saw a post responding to a similar problem but only in internet browser, one reply suggested reregistering the dll for the mouse in IE. I tried this, didn't work - is there a dll which would address my problems?This seems like a hardware issue to me because both the touchpad and external mouse have the same problem? Agree/Disagree? I can do a system recovery or reformat if necessary, just looking for a way to avoid that if possible. I did manage to limp through backing everything up.