4 Replies Latest reply: Apr 3, 2009 3:51 AM by P Spier RSS

    Keyboard strange acting

    Bullitt667 Community Member
      Every now and then (about 3 - 4 times a week, the keyboard on my Dell Precision 490, Win XP, InDesign CS4, goes haywire, but is fixed if I shut down InDesign and restart. An example, if I hold down shift and hit the "^" key, I will get "&". I also lose mouse wheel scrolling function.

      Strange. Anyone else see this happen?
        • 1. Re: Keyboard strange acting
          P Spier CommunityMVP
          Any chance you have multiple languages enabled? I seem to recall that the shortcut for switching languages by default is the same as one of the commonly used shortcuts in ID. This used to cause no end of trouble in school where they had English and French enabled on the student newspaper machines.

          Peter
          • 2. Re: Keyboard strange acting
            Joel Cherney Community Member
            Yeah, the Windows shortcut for switching languages is left control + shift. So, it's not an ID shortcut by itself, but chances are that you're going to use control + shift all the time in ID if you use keyboard shortcuts with any frequency.
            • 3. Re: Keyboard strange acting
              [Jongware] Community Member
              I have this routine check on freshly installed systems. Whack the left shift key five times, fast -- if any of the so-called "Smart" keyboard extensions are active, it'll pop up a configuration dialog. It has about 5 or 6 options -- just disable all of them.

              In compliance with other parts of the OS, the keyboard language toggle setting is hidden somewhere else. I think if it's enabled it should show a little national flag in the system tray, and you can double-click this to configure.
              • 4. Re: Keyboard strange acting
                P Spier CommunityMVP
                I use Ctrl + Shift about a million times a day while scaling pictures. My memory is we had to a actually go in and DISABLE the second language (which we didn't need, fortunately) because even TELLING Windows to disable the shortcut wasn't good enough. Good old Microsoft.

                Peter