I've got a laptop with a touchpad that has a scroll area over on the right side of the pad. In Windows it works great, but on Linux it just acts like part of the touch pad. Has anyone gotten this to work?

yes,

you need to use the synaptic driver in your X, and if it's the nonstandard area, you have to specify which parts of the mouse are used for scrolling, Ububntu should autodetect the settings for you, so use Ubuntu live get the settings and copy it over to your regular distro.