I have a keyboard problem

I generally keep my travel power bound to Alt+tilde and I set auto run to Alt+R so I don't accidentally hit it and take off running into a group of enemies and up until the other morning this setup has served me well. When I logged in later the same afternoon I noticed that these binds weren't working. I tried resetting the binds but that didn't fix it. Thinking it might be a game glitch I exited and restarted the game. They still didn't work. So I decided to reboot the PC but that didn't fix it either.

Next, I downloaded a keyboard tester and tested my keyboard (the game wasn't loaded at the time). The tester shows that the Alt key, R key and tilde key are all recognized when pressed. Holding Alt and pressing any other key but those two the secondary key will be recognized. Holding Shift or Control and pressing any key including R and tilde the secondary key is recognized, but when holding Alt it does not recognize the key when you press R or tilde. If you hold Alt it shows it as repeating input until another key is pressed. When I press R or tilde while holding Alt the repeating stops so it detects that a key is pressed, but just not which key. Again, all other keys get recognized and R and tilde are recognized in combination with Shift or Control.

Even though I thought it odd that both quit working at the same time and was unlikely to be the keyboard itself, I did try another keyboard and the problem persisted. I tried uninstalling the keyboard from Device Manager and letting it reinstall itself on reboot but that didn't help either So, I'm guessing that maybe it's a problem within windows itself. I tried running a system restore to go back to a restore point before the problem occurred, but of course the piece of crap that is system restore wouldn't work, so now I'm stuck. I thought perhaps the key mapping got screwed up somehow but so far I've been unable to find anything about remapping a key combination.

Any idea on how I might fix it?

I don't have the game loaded, but I'm pretty sure that you can go into Options:Keyboard and change the keys there. Otherwise, you can go into the "keybinds.txt" file and manually assign things. Make sure you use the same sort of capitalization, spacing, etc when editing the file. Then you'd need to simply "load default binds" from the options menu.

Thanks, but I know. I've already tried all that. It's not the keybinds themselves. The problem exists even when the game is not running and it persisted even after a reboot of the PC. The fact that it occurs using two different keyboards makes me think it's something in Windows itself. I mean what are the odds that two separate keyboards would have the exact same two key combinations be bad?

Have you installed anything else between when it workd and when you first noticed it not doing so.

Some mice/Keyboards etc allow you to set up macros on them some of which may be preloaded so if the control software for something like that or possibly the drivers themselves have been updated that could explain it.


Have you tried setting the bind up for a different key combination.
Also bear in mind that resetting binds will revert them all to game defaults and so you would then need to reapply your own ones.

No, nothing was installed in-between. I was playing that morning and when I logged back in that evening they didn't work. My keyboard has programmable keys but I don't use them. There's not even a profile that it could load. I did uninstall the keyboard from device manager and let it reinstall itself on reboot but it didn't help.

I forgot if this has been covered, but have you done stuff like turning it upsidedown, taken canned air to it, or that gooie KB cleaning stuff?

Yes, I did the upside down and canned air procedures as well as well as popping off the keys to make sure I got everything. More importantly, as I stated above, I tried a completely different keyboard and had the same problem.

I narrowed the problem down to Chrome. If I have Chrome running in the background, either the browser itself or a background process like Gmail notifier, those two key combos stop working. Once I close Chrome or any background process running that uses Chrome they start working again. I'd had Chrome installed but hadn't used it much until recently after I got fed up with Firefox's CPU spikes. That's why the problem seemed to appear out of the blue when I hadn't installed anything new.

My system is NOT crappy, thank you for assuming. This is a known issue with Firefox that has been going on for quite a long time that seems to only get worse with each update. You can find quite a few complaints about it online but Mozilla has never acknowledged it nor tried to fix it as far as I know. The suspected culprit is Flash video. It seems that after watching a undetermined, seemingly random number of videos on Youtube, etc Firefox will start having CPU usage spikes where it will go from 3% or 5% usage up to 15% up to 25% usage then back to 3% every 4 to 10 seconds. When this happens Firefox will freeze briefly even when you are no longer watching videos. This makes scrolling the page, typing in a text box, etc a pain because it freezes every few seconds. It used to be that it only happened occasionally and restarting Firefox would fix it, temporarily, but lately it happens almost every time and I've had the problem persist even after restarting Firefox. I finally just had enough of it.

There have been some reports of the same issue in Chrome but I've yet to see it.

Well if he opened up a ton of tabs then I can see a problem with lack of memory or if the pages are constantly refreshing then maybe CPU utilization. Also current versions of Chrome and Firefox do use hardware acceleration for displaying pages on top of Windows 7 using Aero for the windows manager, that could affect performance as well.