Help Anyone know how to fix ghost touches?

[maesh]

I have a Samsung Galaxy s4 Active and have been experiencing serious issues of late. When using the phone, I get a lot of ghost touches. I enabled the dev option to see touches, and often, there will be a row of 5 "touches" indicated across the screen. It happens on one of two areas; in portrait, the bottom of the screen, and the middle of the screen.

When this isn't happening, I get "double touches" where I'm typing. I use Swiftkey and if I type a 'g' or a 't', the phone registers two touches. Same for 'p' usually. I tried turning off Swiftkey, but still had the problems.

I've booted into safe mode, deleted a bunch of third party apps, seen an OS upgrade, turned off and on again, but nothing seems to work.

Has anyone here had this issue and/or know how to fix it? I found this post on another forum about a different device about digitizer grounding issues, but before prying open the phone (and potentially getting in over my head) I wanted to know what others thought.

Thanks!

 

[maesh]

Small update: I took the phone apart. Pulled out the motherboard, checked connections. It was going to be too great a task to get to the digitizer but I had hoped the re-connecting of things would help.

It did not. Any ideas? Or am I going to be pretty much stuck with a big repair bill or purchase of a new phone?

 

[maesh]

Another update. I chatted with Samsung service. Their suggestion was to factory reset the phone, but I haven't yet done that yet. If that doesn't work, they've quoted me at $70 repair bill (which wouldn't honestly be too bad). Any advice before I send in for a repair?