[robertjm]

Hi all,

Have a really strange thing going on. I can be typing along just fine when all of a sudden the focus of the keyboard is pinned to the menu bar.

Example:

I'm typing this forum post and in the middle of the sentence the FILE menu in Firefox becomes the item with focus (as if I hit Alt-F). Also, every once in a while a keystroke will be ignored and I will hear a warning klaxon.

Sometimes I am scrolling a page with the down arrow key fully pressed and this will happen. And these problems occur in all programs, not just Firefox, which I was just using as an example.

I had been thinking it was the keyboard going south on me because the problem started occurring after I had W7 RC1 installed for some time. However, yesterday I was experimenting with the LiveCD of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 a2). While I wasn't using it nearly as much as I usually do in W7, the problem never occurred, which leads me to speculate the problem is within W7 itself.

Has anyone experienced any problems with keyboard focus like this? I searched around, but couldn't find anything that matched the description.

[TerryNet]

Don't recall encountering quite this problem before. What kind of keyboard--PS/2, USB, wireless, etc.?

[robertjm]

Guess I left that out of my original post, and my .sig didn't append either!

This is an HP Compaq NC6000 laptop with a built-in keyboard. The system manager lists it as a "standard PS/2 keyboard"

[TerryNet]

The most common cause of the focus changing when using a laptop keyboard is accidentally touching the touchpad (especially the scroll bar strip if it has one) with the thumb or wrist. If this isn't what's happening I can't think of anything other than a hardware defect.

[robertjm]

Thanks Terry!

I did a Google search for turning off the touchpad, even though I was pretty sure I not hitting the pad inadvertently. Upon finding a couple of links it pointed to a settings in the Synaptic touchpad driver. However, what I had installed on my computer was a generic driver.

Turns out HP issued a new driver in late December 2009, however, my computer never figured out there was a driver update to install. I've installed it and now it says Synaptic Touchpad in Device Manager, and I have yet to have a problem with the keyboard focus!!

I'll keep using the computer for a couple of days and if the problem doesn't come up again I'll mark the thread as resolved.

Later,

Robert

[TerryNet]

That's pretty good news. As an aside, don't trust Windows update or Device Manager to find drivers for you. Many correct ones are not found, and sometimes a wrong one is found.

[TerryNet]

By the way, your signature didn't append because you are still wet behind the ears. Seriously, there have been so many problems with spammers using their signatures for inappropriate links and messages that the signature is suppressed until you have a certain number of posts.

Computer information can also be put in the Computer specs portion of your profile (see the computer icon on this post for my example).