After probably a year of this I really wanted to find the solution today.... and I did. Feel like such a noob. Basically in the process of trying to re-find the page through Google I found another.....
Basically said on the F6 key there's a picture of a touchpad with a line through it. Press Fn + F6.... mine was on F3.
Worked... well worked enough. Have to do it each time I remove the dongle... haven't tried to see what happens after reboot w/o dongle.
...And apparently I don't do much reading Lol, as I look over the replies once more and see mikeymike said the same thing.
Explore the properties of each. You can also pull the mouse's Wi-Fi dongle and see which one goes away.
It seems there is quite a few entries with duplicate names and this is what confused me. Under Control Pad -> Hardware -> Mouse -> Hardware Tab w/o the dongle there is one entry for my touchpad and one for "HID-compliant mouse." When I insert the dongle I have two "HID-compliant mouse." In the device manager like 5 entries appear when I insert the dongle, most are dupes. And some that seem would refer to the dongle are present in both cases (HID-compliant wireless radio controls).
Quite pleased I'm not stuck with mouse.

Perhaps next year I will get the gumption to really fix it.
