Strange Keyboard Behavior

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'm not sure where to post this, so I figured this place might get the best eyeballs.

I ran into a really bizarre situation this morning. If I could figure it out, it could become the basis of a neat practical joke, but I have no idea what happened. I was in MS Outlook typing an email, when the K key suddenly stopped working. I don't know that I did anything, but I certainly might have hit some kind of odd key combination. At first, I thought it was the batteries in my wireless keyboard going dead, but the wireless keyboard was sending keys to a laptop, so I tried the laptop keyboard and the K key wasn't working there, either.

I then tried the other keys on the keyboard. Most were working normally, except that the X key would produce some three digit key code, possibly the code for the last key pressed prior to the X. The backspace was not deleting the last character, either, but was deleting the last row of text, or the last sentence (I didn't study the behavior enough to determine which it was). Those were the only three keys that appeared to be acting different.

I then opened up NotePad, where all the keys worked normally. I followed that by opening IE and trying a Google search. Once again, all the keys were normal.

One other thing that I noted was that when I pressed the K key, it isn't the case that nothing was happening. The cursor briefly turned into the wait cursor, then reverted back to normal. This suggests that the K key was launching a process that took significant time, though less than a second, and that whatever the process was, it had no visible result.

Finally, I closed Outlook, then opened it again, and all was back to normal.

So the question is: What did I hit, and what was happening?

[FunkyDexter]

We decided you we're getting a bit pudgy so we snuck into your office and installed Special K.

Just a thought but is it possible you somehow locked the ctrl or alt key on or something like that? That would essentially turn all your key strokes into shortcut key combos. I'm not sure it would produce exactly the results you've described because I'd expect alot of other keys to be doing unexpected things but it would certainly create some behaviour that would be surprising if you weren't expecting it.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I discussed this with my sister, who does training for various Office products. She pointed out that the three oddities I was seeing were consistent with the Alt key being pressed. The K, Backspace, and X keys were all doing what they should do with the Alt key pressed. However, if the Alt key was locked, most of the other keys would also have done other things, but they were working normally.

Unfortunately, this suggests that what I saw was just a glitch, which may have been restricted to Outlook that one time. That's too bad, because the behavior was so peculiar that it would be excellent fodder for practical jokes if it could be replicated. It appears that the replication will not be possible, though, so I shall have to go back to other things.

[Nightwalker83]

Well, if you hold the Alt key down then hit "K" for example it stops working. However, I suspect that it might also have something to do with the hot keys, such as, if I hold Alt and press "H" the help menu would open whereas if you do "Ctrl + H" the "Find and Replace" box appears (at least in Office Outlook 2003).

[Siddharth Rout]

Thread moved to General PC from General Developer Forum

[Shaggy Hiker]

I had always thought of General PC as being hardware, but I realized the other day that it isn't JUST that.

When this issue happened, it was doing what it should as if the Alt key was pressed, but ONLY for the three keys: K, X, and Backspace. All the other keys were acting as normal, and I tested all of them. It must have just been a temporary glitch.

[ahmedkhairy]

I think a rather radical solution is to try and connect a different keyboard and see if the issue still stands..if it turns out to be a software and not a hardware problem..then try reinstalling your operating system.
Hope this helps