I am a bit of a fumble-fingered typist; I can hit several keys accidentally especially on
a long reach to the lower left (e.g, towards or including CTRL, SHIFT, FN) or upper right (BS, DELETE, HOME, END, NUMLK).
Normally I just get a junk character, hit Backspace, and go on with my life.
Once a day or so, when doing one of these long reaches on a Sony VAIO keyboard, that feels like a fumble,
the keyboard goes into strange state after which I cannot enter any standard printing characters. When this happens, the underlying program seems to be getting odd characters when I push a regular key; I get beeps or some program action occurs. Switching to another window with the mouse doesn't help. When I switch to a Firefox window, typing either T or CTRL + T gets me a new Tab suggests that that the keyboard or the system thinks the CTRL key is depressed.
This make the machine effectively useless.
The "cure" is to log out an log back in again. Problem goes away, but you lose all the running applications and any partially complete updates you may have made with them. A PC that loses work you have done is pretty frustrating; they are supposed to be productivity enhancing, not productivity disabling devices.
It isn't the accessibility/sticky key options; I found them the first time this happened and turned them all off.
I've been living on Windows boxes and laptops since NT 3.5, and have never encountered this problem on any of those systems. [I wouldn't buy a Sony again.]
Is there any way with just the mouse ask Windows or the VAIO what state the keyboard is in, just so I can verify its status? Is there a way to reset the keyboard to decent state? Is there something I can do to prevent this idiocy from occurring, other than becoming a perfect typist?
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