HUGE problems with static

[Rei~]

Here's the deal: I have a home-made pad, a modded afterburner, and a TX-7000 or whatever (I'm keeping it for someone else). NONE of them will work consistently on my laptop unless I play barefoot. The laptop will stop reading the pad in the middle of a song, and will recognize the pad again as soon as I step off. Again, playing barefoot completely solves this. The afterburner has this problem on my PS2 as well, but the homepad does not (by that I mean I played through Pandy Expert with no disconnect).

I'm using a regular control box with the afterburner, and I ripped out another redoctane control box from a cheap pad. The converter is a redoctane 3-in-1 PS2 adapter.

My first suspicion is the control box, since my flux (when I still had it) almost never had any problems playing on the laptop. However, I wouldn't put it past RO to make their converter suck as well.

If anyone has dealt with this problem, TELL ME WHAT YOU DID TO FIX IT. There are a few things I can try, but I'd really rather not waste a ton of money doing hit-or-miss fixes, especially if someone has advice.

Feel free to ask for more detailed information. THANK YOU in advance for your help.