keyboard weirdness

[Tannin]

Working normally and all of a sudden capslock is on, but the capslock light is off. Press shift to switch off capslock (or capslock, depending on which you you have the keyboard prefferences set) and the alpha keys work normally, but the capslock light goes on!

Worse:

* a: the number keys produce !@#$%^&*() instead of 1234567890 - and do this no matter what you do with the shift and caps-lock keys
* b: the mouse does weird stuff too - i.e., click a different tab in your browser window and it closes the tab instead of switching to it. Sudden death (such as I suffered in the other thread just now). Click an ordinary link and it opens in a new tab instead of just opening. And so on.

I thought it was a stuck key when it happened to me the other day, buggerised around, rebooted, disconnected external keyboard, did other stuff, and it went away.

It came back just now, I have no idea why. Buggerised around again, rebooted, disconnected external keyboard, rebooted again .... nothin fixed it till I powered off and powered on again.

Oh, you get the exact same weirdness with the built-in Thinkpad keyboard as on the external ones - numbers turn into !@#$ and so on.

Is this a hardware fault? Weird one if it is.

Is it a Windows XP thing?

Can't really see it being a Thinkpad thing, as I have never seen it ever before, and I've done a lot of miles on Thinkpads.

Oh, the Windows sticky-keys utility ain't the answer - that is switched off.

Any ideas?

 

[Mercutio]

Is this a laptop keyboard?

 

[Tannin]

Yes, it's a Thinkpad, Merc, but it always happens when I'm using an external keyboard. But then unless I'm on the road, and quite often even then if I can be bothered taking it out of the car, I always use an external keyboard with the laptop.

Not always the same keyboard though. This present one (at home) is an IBM one stolen off some sort of IBM desktop system, P/2 interface. The one at work which (like this one) remains plugged into an IBM port replicator II all the time is a PS/2 Mitsubishi. And I'm pretty sure I duplicated the problem here at home the other day with a Mitsubishi USB external keyboard.

So I'm not sure what relevance the external keyboards have, if any. They are the same keyboards I have used for ages with my previous Thinkpad without ever getting the problems.

But it does seem like one of those weird things laptops do - you know, like when you accidentally hit whatever key combination it is to turn certain of the letter keys into a psudo-numpad. In other words, it doesn't have the feel of an actual fault, it seems more like some sort of stupid working-as-designed "feature".

But I can't figure it out.

 

[Tannin]

Just to clarify, once the problem manifests, the laptop keyboard and the external keyboards do exactly the same thing. - if you type 1234 on either keyboard you get "!@#$" no matter what, and if you type qwer you get "qwer" with capslock ON and "QWER" with capslock OFF!

Weird.

 

[Mercutio]

Try hitting Shift-Numlock to toggle it on and off.
It's a kind of a whacky issue that lots and lots of thinkpads have, something about numlock behavior with an external keyboard and I don't remember the details since I don't bother to use anything but the perfect keyboard that's already on the thinkpad, but either Shift-Numlock or ctrl-Numlock switches it to work properly again.

 

[Tea]

Cool. Thanks Merc. CTRL_NUMLOCK. Who'd a thunk of that? Interesting that it only shows up on some models.

 

[Tea]

You nailed it Merc! Right shift-numlock does the trick. Thankyou!