Synaptics touchpad loses its settings intermittently

From time to time, the Synaptics touchpad on my Samsung N145 Plus will lose "advanced features", like scroll area on the right side. I used to have a script to take care of this, IIRC by doing sudo rmmod psmouse sudo modprobe psmouse But now, this workaround is not working. Enabling and disabling the touchpad via the hotkey doesn't work, either. The problem is also wider, because the physical second (right) button and tap-to-click are also disabled. I am using CrunchBang Linux, based on Debian 7 wheezy. grep "TouchPad: buttons:" /var/log/Xorg.0.log gives synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: buttons: left right double triple and synclient -l gives, among other things, TapButton1 = 0 EdgeMotionUseAlways = 0 VertEdgeScroll = 0 How can I re-enable the right button, tapping for left-click and vertical soft-scrolling on the touchpad, without resorting to a reboot?