[Hellie]

I have been keeping the laptop surgery people at my work bussy for two days but they have no clue how to fix my problem. They have managed to establish that it is not a material/technical problem, but that it must be a virus or something else software related. The laptop is a Dell inspiron 5100.

It started with my keyboard all of a sudden acting as if the ctrl button was pressed all the time, then my mouse was reacting odly when pressing the right click button, then the keyboard stopped functioning in any way and I had to use the onscreen keyboard, then after leaving the computer to rest for a while the keyboard worked with the only strange exception of the g key which keeps popping up the start menu when it's pressed. Very annoying when writing something. The windows fast key is not functioning either. It doesn’t do all this in Bart PE. I managed to solve the mouse problem by toggling with the left-hand right-handed versions.

An additional problem is that I cannot use any new USB plug and play devices, it pretends that it has to look for drivers even for memory keys. Older USB devices can still be read (Thank GOD!). Sounds like a virus? No virusscan can detect it.

We've run spyware and virusscans on the laptop, reinstalled the drivers for the keyboard and restored the computer to a point before this actually happened but to no avail. The problems continue to exist.

Any ideas on what this might be and if there is a solution?

Eternally greatful if you know of a solution,

hellie

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Hi Hellie...

Have you tried an external keyboard with this machine to see if it works correctly on the external? It's hard to say where this issue originates, but we'll try to get it sorted out...

Shut the system down and remove all power connections, both AC adapter and Battery. Leave the system off for at least one minute and see if there is any change in the way the keyboard behaves.

If you suspect you may have been infected with some kind of malware (and there are several that utilize device hooks), you should probably post in the malware forum and let the experts look over a HiJackThis log to fild out for sure. Malware Forum

wannabe1

[wannabe1]

Hi Hellie...

Have you tried an external keyboard with this machine to see if it works correctly on the external? It's hard to say where this issue originates, but we'll try to get it sorted out...

Shut the system down and remove all power connections, both AC adapter and Battery. Leave the system off for at least one minute and see if there is any change in the way the keyboard behaves.

If you suspect you may have been infected with some kind of malware (and there are several that utilize device hooks), you should probably post in the malware forum and let the experts look over a HiJackThis log to fild out for sure. Malware Forum

wannabe1

[Hellie]

Hi Wannabe,

I cannot connect an external keyboard since it won't read any new devices on the USB port which is the only port I have (no PS2 I'm afraid)to connect a keyboard ....Windows asks me to install drivers which it then won't accept.

I will try shutting down completely and report back tomorrow morning if it made any difference. Why am I pessimistic ?

Thanks for the tip on the malware forum....will post my query there too.

[wannabe1]

If you have the XP installation cd for that machine, you might run the System File Checker on it, too.

To do this, click Start, then Run, type sfc /scannow (note the space after sfc), and press "Ok". This check will take a while...it's important that you let it finish. This may help the USB problem...

wannabe1