[bobhjon]

I'm running WinXP Pro with plenty of HDD space and RAM. Recently, whenever I hit any of the buttons in most of my apps, the screen flickers, but the button doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Similarly, when I try to enter text or numbers into a Dialog Box, as soon as I click on the insertion line, the insert pointer flashes and then disappears, and no data can be entered. For example, in Foxfire browser, when I click in the address bar, the current entry turns blue, but it will not accept any new entry. The search boxes show a cursor, but also will accept no data entry. Even worse, I can't even enter my account number in my bank's login screen. At first, I thought this might be a keyboard problem, but I changed keyboards with no improvement. And I can't even run scannow or any of the other diagnostics because they all require text entries. What to do??

[Advertisements]

Hello and Welcome to Geeks To Go

Can you copy and paste the words sfc /scannow in to the run box? Make a text file on the computer you are using now and past it in. As you might know it will give you a blue bar and repair corrupt files belonging to XP. Make sure you already have the XP CD in your computer before you run it.

[Michael]

Hello and Welcome to Geeks To Go

Can you copy and paste the words sfc /scannow in to the run box? Make a text file on the computer you are using now and past it in. As you might know it will give you a blue bar and repair corrupt files belonging to XP. Make sure you already have the XP CD in your computer before you run it.

[bobhjon]

Great idea, Michael, but like many great ideas, it didn't work. It , however, better defines the problem. Since I was getting no keyboard error on bootup, I was almost convinced that the WinXP keyboard driver was corrupted, but now, since the cutting and failed pasteing has nothing to do with the keyboard, it must be in the OS itself. While I had Notepad loaded, I tried to type in there ... nothing! So I pulled in a DOS screen, and couldn't enter there either. Even worse, I booted from a very old MSDOS6 diskette, I had laying around. It booted fine, but would not show or accept anything I entered to the command line. So now it looks like a hardware problem with which I'm completely lost. Any idea where I could get hardware help short of going to a $65 /hr computer store?

[Michael]

I don't know if you have noticed but we have a hardware fourm (where I never go because I can't help because I am not good with hardware). Post there and link to here so they know where you are coming from.