Back on (key)board

[davidgillon]

After some more poking about the net, and 10 days or so of only being able to type stuff using the on-screen keyboard, which is incredibly tedious, I finally graduated last night to deleting the entire USB controller driver, which seems to have fixed stuff - at least for now. Next step was going to be rolling Windows back to circa start of April as there was a definite link between when I first started having issues (initially intermittent) and a Windows update. Might even need to go back a bit further as I can't remember precisely how long the intermittent phase lasted.

Trying to fix this stuff is incredibly tedious as you need to reboot at each stage, doubly so when you have to delete the USB controller and therefore lose the mouse as well as the keyboard, so have to use the on/off switch to force a reboot. The Dell page on the issue wants you to delete every controller listed under USB in Windows device drivers, which in my case was about 10. Fortunately the first one seems to have fixed it.

And I can't help rolling my eyes at the Windows shortcuts to invoke the accessible keyboard being physical keyboard based. Can anyone spot an obvious problem here?

Comments

[hairyears]

There's a reason why the first thing I do with an HVD - the hosted virtual desktop of a virtual PC on a remote server - is activate OSK, the on-screen keyboard, so that it is present at startup and usable when ( not if!) I find myself logging-in to a remote desktop that recognises a pointing device but not the keyboard.

[davidgillon]

What's ridiculous with the accessible keyboard and the generic Windows login is while it's only a couple of clicks to get the accessible keyboard up and running so you can actually login, it then doesn't remember to keep it up once you're logged in. Possibly because the accessible keyboard for login and the accessible keyboard for in a session seem to be different pieces of code - the keyboards are similar, but not identical. Nor is the in-session keyboard one of the things Windows now preserves across sessions.

[jesse_the_k]

groan