After many months of toil and frustration, I finally tracked down the root of my problems with the Wacom tablet on Ubuntu. It was quite frustrating, since the tablet worked fine if I ran from a live CD, but failed once I installed to the hard drive. Everything else worked but the tablet. So I suffered and found work-arounds.
After compiling and installing new Wacom drivers yet again and another round of fruitless poking, I stumbled across a reference to a similar sounding problem. There was a post by some end user that was completely non-technical and involved talking about his admin and things that he had done when I hit a mention of the culprit...
It was the dreaded, the insidious, the crafty...
Mouse-Emu!!!!!
It turns out that the mouseemu software normally used to make a touchpad on a laptop more friendly had turned evil in this case. It perhaps was handling the touchpad fine, but it also got greedy and grabbed the external Wacom itself. The simple fix was to just go into Synaptic and remove mouseemu there. Voila! Happy-happy Wacom time!!!!
So if a tablet is showing up properly in the low-level view, but stops responding... it might be the tricky mouseemu.
