Keyboard autorepeat adds keyup events

[substitute]

Hi all. An "interesting" problem!

We all know that if you press a key and hold it down it "autorepeats", hold down "w" and you get "

http://wwwwwww".

Now, if you look under the hood you'll see that the application gets a series of events. A single press gives "keydown keypress keyup" and if held down so autorepeat cuts in you get "keydown keypress keydown keypress ..... keyup". Or you should.

One of my new Windows 7 PCs instead gives "keydown keypress keyup keydown keypress keyup .....". The difference is subtle and invisible to most programs, but fatal to games. To a game it looks like the user is hammering the key rather than simply holding it down. That kills the game.

Has anyone come across this, and does anyone know what causes it and how to cure it? I've spent all evening googling and apart from an obscure bug with the Opera browser I can't find a solution.

The PC is an Acer laptop with Windows 7 home premium 64 bit. The problem is NOT hardware related, it happens with a USB keyboard or the built-in keyboard. The keyboard driver appears to be the same Windows driver as all my other PCs. Filterkeys isn't turned on, autorepeat settings are normal. I've scanned for malware using Windows Defender Offline (Microsoft Security Essentials is running)

(I found out abut the extra events by writing a simple VB program to report keyboard events. Runnng it on all other PCs gives one keyup event on physical key up, on the dodgy PC it gives the repeated keyups during autorepeat)

Ideas?

Ian.

 

[linney]

I know you say it is not hardware related but all I can suggest are the following.

Have you checked out the Speed tab of the Keyboard in the Control Panel to see what the settings are for things like "Character Repeat" and "Repeat Rate". Have you compared those settings with other machine's Keyboards? Does changing them make any difference.


If you test with another Windows user do you have the same problems?


Is there any Bios update available, or can you try the Safe Default setting in the Bios?

What do you see if you use the On Screen Keyboard. Type osk in the Start Run box. Of course any repeat or speed rate is limited to Mouse actions in osk.

 

[substitute]

Thanks for the response Linney. I had tried most of that including the OSK.

I've actually just fixed it. A bit of a "doh!" moment really. I booted safe mode and established that the keyboard events were OK there. From there I used selective boot to narrow down the options and eventually found the culprit.

My daughter is dyslexic and uses a program "Global Autocorrect" which intercepts the keyboard and replaces typical dyslexic mistakes with real words. She used my laptop a few weeks ago. So the program was still sitting there monitoring what I type. And replacing autorepeated keystrokes with individual ones. Gone now!

Ian.