Erdos2 Loc: Vancouver, WA

I spent most of my time yesterday trying to figure out why the shift key on my mother's computer isn't working correctly. I tried all the obvious things (obvious to me) and it is still broken.

The symptoms are:
holding down the shift key and pressing another character acts like I held down the ctrl key and pressed that button. For example, in MS Word, normally a Shift-B types a capital B and Ctrl-B toggles the Bold setting. For her computer, Shift-B does toggels Bold and Ctrl-B does nothing.

I tried the following with many reboots:

- Used a known good keyboard from my computer (it showed the same error).

- Uninstall the keyboard drivers and reinstalling them.

- Changed the locale/region settings (for both the system and the keyboard) to another setting (english in UK) and then changing them back (to English in US)

- Run Glary Utilities to clean the registry, etc.

- Checked for viruses

- Changed the "sticky keys" settings to enabled and then back to disabled.

- I had upgraded to Windows 10 within the past month, so I took it back to Windows 7.


Nothing worked. Caps lock is ok, however that is awkward and only gets the capital letters, not the shift characters above the numbers and other symbols.

The system is over 5 years old, so it might be better to replace it rather than have some shop diagnose and attempt to repair it.

She (at 83 yrs old) mostly just surfs the internet, reads email, but also creates a newsletter for her church, so it is important enough to fix.

She discovered the issue when trying to respond to an email. It feels like she accidently did something to change a setting, but she has not idea if she did something to trigger this behavior

Has anyone seen this issue?

Anything else, I should try?

Thank,

Jerry

mtbear

I had this problem years ago on a Mac. The OS came with a macro tool and the persons children had accidentally created a macro that nulled a key.

This sounds like a keyboard mapping problem but I no longer know Windows well enough to suggest exactly what the problem is or how to fix it.

Look for a program or resource that is shared by both versions of windows or is indigenous to the hardware.

Shellback Loc: North of Cheyenne Bottoms Wetlands - Kansas

Google "how to reset keyboard in win 7 or 10"- try what they suggest.

zigipha Loc: north nj

yeah id say its a windows remapping or a word thing

does the same thing happen in other application (excel, etc)

RichieC Loc: Adirondacks

Find and throw away the preference file for the keyboard.

On a mac it is located here:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

(Better to actually put it someplace else- in case you ever need to move it back-moving it away from where the computer expects to find it basically hides it from your os -it won't go looking for it!)

You have the ability to customize the keyboard, or run other languages/alphabets, etc. this preference file can become corrupted, or accidentally created. Upon starting and your computer does not find the preference file, it will simply create a new one with default settings- which is what you want here.



That's the fix for macs- may also work in windows, I did find this:

https://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-ca/help/support/troubleshooting/keyboard/common-issues

Erdos2 Loc: Vancouver, WA

As a quick follow-up for those who might stumble across this in the future....

I could not find anything within Windows that caused the issue.

I did find a program called SharpKeys to remap keyboard keys. By mapping left ctrl to left shift and right ctrl to right shift, she can now use the shift keys to get to all the keys she was not able to with the issue. For what she uses the computer for this will work. She doesn't have ctrl keys that work, because I could not figure out what the computer thought they were acting like, so I could not remap them. However I don't think she ever used them anyway. (That would drive me nuts, but not her)

Jerry