OT: PC keyboard problem

[MBQ]

Sorry, another one of those "I know it's OT but I trust you guys..."

I Just bought one of the kids a PC in Office World (It's a long story) pentium 4 with via chipset and one of those awful space saver keyboards (with editing and arrow keys in the main block of keys). The keyboard also has lots of extra buttons for volume, etc.

It seems that any game (ie all that we've tried so far) that use the arrow keys (maybe other keys as well) exhibit the same problem. If the key is held down the game freezes. When the key is released it starts again. All of the games run perfectly OK on other machines.

I can't get back to the shop until the weekend so I'm looking for ideas. The obvious one is to try another keyboard which I'll do tonight.

MBQ

[Jeremy Collins]

I guess the KB came with driver software to handle those extra volume etc buttons. Try unistalling that driver and rebooting; Windows should then use a standard KB driver. This may solve your game problem, at the cost of losing a bit of "useful" functionality.

Some Logitech mouse drivers have a similar problem in games.

[MBQ]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately the keyboard is listed as a normal 101 key keyboard and uses the microsoft drivers. I don't know how the extra buttons are intercepted. A plain vanilla keyboard didn't solve the problem.

The only thing I have been able to do is reduce the repeat rate which was set to maximum. This doesn't completely solve the problem. On my other machine everything works fine with the repeat rate at max.

MBQ

[Lee]

This wouldn't be a USB keyboard would it...? ;)

Also, there could still be additional keyboard sotware installed, like my "multimedia" keyboard uses - which still shows up as using the "standard" Microsoft driver in device manager.

Lee

[MBQ]

No.

Any ideas where to look for it or how to uninstall it?

MBQ

[Lee]

Assuming XP, I'd start by looking at the running processes in task manager, and do a Google on any that I didn't recognise or that had a name that looked like it might be keyboard related.

If one is running, then you will at least then know what it's called and can look in "add/remove programs" or run "msconfig" to temporarily stop it starting.

Lee