Fingerprint sensor on Thinkpad T60 says “Hardware not connected”

When I booted up my thinkpad T60 yesterday morning and tried to use the fingerprint login I got the error message that the hardware was not connected, with only 2 months left on my warranty - it was looking like I was going to have to send it back.

Before I did that however I thought let me just run the hardware diagnostic PC Doctor, this did not find any problem so I downloaded all the thinkpad updates avaliable and restart. When the thinkpad came back on I logged initially had the same problem - but then if I gently swiped my finger on the sensor it worked.

I am not sure why the different updates sorted out the problem but it did. This is true in many case - if you are having a problem in windows for example - try downloading the updates first and seeing if that solved the problem.