Thursday, October 1, 2009

Keyboard Skipping in Internet Explorer

For my first post I thought that I'd write about a problem that I had at work today. A customer was having a problem with his keyboard randomly skipping keys. The problem only occurred when he was using Internet Explorer. Therefore, we could easily conclude that the problem was not hardware related. Otherwise the keyboard would skip no matter the application in use. We could also conclude that the problem must be related to Internet Explorer.

Since the user had a lot of tool bars installed, I suspected the problem was related to an Add-on. Internet Explorer 7 introduced a feature that allows it to be started without any of the Add-ons loaded. To accomplish this:

Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Internet Explorer(No Add-ons)

This proved my suspicion. The keyboard worked perfectly.

Next, I needed to figure out which of the Add-ons was causing the problem. To do this:

Tools>Manage Add-ons...>Select an Add-on>Select 'Disable'


One way to find our problem Add-on would be to disable each Add-on one-by-one until the offending Add-on is revealed. This may indeed be the only way.

If you know that an Add-on has been recently installed in Internet Explorer or for some reason you have a 'bad feeling' about one of the Add-ons, this would, obviously, be the place to start. Otherwise, disable them one at a time until the problem is resolved.


Posted by Dwight Martin at 8:04 PM
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3 comments:

  1. amieJanuary 3, 2010 at 6:03 PM

    I am having this exact problem. I started Internet Explorer without add-ons and my keyboard skipping problem was gone. However, when i disabled each add-on individual I still had the problem. It took a while because I have a lot of add-ons. I never could figure out which add-on was causing the problem. Any other suggestions?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dwight MartinJanuary 4, 2010 at 5:48 AM

    Well, if the problem is gone when add-ons are disabled, it should be one of them. First thing, double check to be sure they are all disabled.

    Next, go to Control Panel then to Add or Remove Programs and see if any of your add-ons are listed. Uninstall any that you don't use or that were recently installed.

    Plus, make sure that you are up-to-date. Use Internet Explorer 8 and make sure all of the operating system updates are installed.

    Other than that, I would suggest using Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html or Google chrome http://www.google.com/chrome

    Hope this helps,
    Dwight

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2010 at 1:22 PM

    I have the same situation ... the keyboard works fine with no add-ons and it works fine, but if I use regular old IE and manually disable each add-on, and they are all off, it still skips letters.

    ReplyDelete

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