My son hit something on the control panel of his Dell notebook that disabled the cursor pad. Do I need to get a mouse, to plug in, to get back to the control panel or is there another way?

Press the Windows logo key on the keyboard. That will bring up the Start menu. From there you can navigate with the arrow keys and press the Enter key to access the items you would normally click on.

Of course, the easiest thing to do would be to connect a mouse temporarily as you mentioned.

Actually a Toshiba. He said he turned it off at the bottom right icons. We were able to get to the control panel to confirm uninstall. We get to touchpad on\off utility. There is a change\remove button. Hit that and we get , Do you want to completely remove the selected application and all of its features? Doesn't seem like I want to hit that button? I can not move cursor down to the touchpad icon on the bottom. Any ideas? Thanks

Do you have Windows XP on that system? A System Restore should put it back the way it was. Otherwise connect a mouse so you're able to navigate properly and click on the touchpad icon to put it back on.

You also could go to the website for the manufacturer and reinstall the drivers for the tp.