I ask as I've now got 2 friends with an identical problem on their machines. Whenever they type anything it turns into garbage on the screen eg. £1$e^%SDF%

Seems too coincidental to be dirty keyboards - anyone know of a virus or bug which you do this ?

Microsoft office?? :D

Drop jack clark a mail. He'd know jackclark@ntlworld.com

Get them to give this a go. FreeScan

Found this
It seems to be a very old virus with variants as well

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_669.htm
best your mate gets hold of some AV software

That's a super old memory resident DOS file infector, if you can get that to run on a modern operating system I'll buy you a beer.

I reckon it's the Stella Artois Virus ;) LOL

I know I know - sound like they're just pi$$ed or something when they're typing, but its not. In fact the moment it started happening was just after we attempted to do the "remote assistance" thing on windows messenger

strange both of them have the same problem at the same time!

both of them are running up-to-date virus protection too.

Beer? :D

John

actually if you look at say the symantec website and its virus database, and search on the keywords "keyboard" and "type" it lists about 3 which intercept the keyboard interrupt and remap it.

Thing is, we checked for these viruses and it can't find any evidence of them.

-DV

You haven't unknowingly changed your default keyboard to Japanese have you? That would have the same effect....

Iain

:) no, but I like your thinking! :)

and its not me, its a mate of mine

am poppnig down to sort his wifi broadband/hub tonight so will check all those kinda things

its seems strange as another friend of mine has an identical problem also on his laptop - which made me think of a virus perhaps.

update - it definitely seems a hardware error to do with his keyboard, as we tried plugging in an external keyboard and that works fine.

Ah, so my suggestion wasn't so outrageous then :D

Maybe try downloading new drivers for it ???

Nicks, part of his keyboard works, part of it doesn't

could be the underlying circuitry - maybe's a dry joint or something.