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Suspicious Windows Behaviour on Workstation

  • 21-04-2009 5:57pm
    #1
    ve
    Closed Accounts Posts: 448 ✭✭


    Hi a Dell E521 machine I have here started acting very strange during a Windows XP session in the last hour and I have no idea what's going on. First thing we noticed is that we couldn't open task manager (3 finger salute). Then when we would press the Windows key, nothing would happen. But when we would click on the Start button, it would popup straight away with no lag. So just the keyboard was acting up, we first thought. So we checked by pressing caps, num lock, etc on the keyboard and the respective lights immediately illuminate. So I wanted to start a DOS shell and when I went to type in the Start -> Run box I noticed everything was in CAPS regardless of whether I had caps turned on or not. Then when I started to type in DOS, any key that required SHIFT to be pressed along side it didn't work. E.g When I pressed the / key, I got ? even if shift was not pressed.

    Also in my Computer, I would click on a folder and all of a sudden loads of folders would be selected instead of accessing the folder I double clicked. At this stage we wanted to reboot the machine. So we tried rebooting and it didn't respond. So then we tried to Log out, and it logged out straight away. We logged straight back in and during the login sequence the PC internal speaker made 3 ascending tones that we never heard before, and the machine continued to login to windows. At this stage we thought WTF, and after a few mins of trying to access and backslash in DOS, the keys just started to work again. Then all the other problems that we noticed just went away. Now we are backing stuff up off the machine like wildfire and want to know has anyone else experienced problems like this before.

    When I heard the tones, I thought either a really cheesy virus, or our motherboard was reporting some manner of hardware problem. Also I want to point out that this machine has an up to date firewall (ZoneAlarm), AVG 8.5 (up to date), and has not had any new software installed lately. It has a dual core processor, 2GB of RAM and was doing some fairly heavy (not more than usual) graphics manipulation tasks this afternoon before the problem occured.

    Any ideas?


Comments

  • #2
    DonkeyStyle \o/
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,145 ✭✭✭DonkeyStyle \o/


    It does sound like the shift key is stuck or somehow fried.
    The beeps could be some windows sticky keys or some crap turning on... or that keyboard buffer beeping you sometimes get in DOS/POST.
    I'd check out the accessibility options and make sure all the stickykeys are turned off and their shortcuts disabled.
    Trying it with another keyboard too.
    It all adds up I think... like the ctrl+alt+del won't work (at least on my PC) if you hold down shift while trying to do it.
    It selecting multiple folders in windows explorer sounds like pretty standard behaviour when shift-clicking, etc.


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