[dbatten]

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.

I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account...

Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing.

I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._

Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

[Intermernet]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)

[dEnigma]

Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.

[civilized]

Getting a "Who's on First" vibe, but I can't quite make it into a real joke...

- "I can't get a p, no matter what I do there's no p at all!"

- "No p?"

- "Nope!"

- "Well if it's a no-op of course there's no p!"

- "It's not a no-op, I'm telling you there's no p!"

[t-writescode]

At a job I worked at, we had servers that were given several internal IP addresses to map to external IP addresses.

One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those IP addresses. They were just gone.

We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try restarting the machine."

It worked.

It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into that "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a very real and legitimate and helpful piece of advice.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious ways.

[atribecalledqst]

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

[miah_]

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

[treeman79]

Remote learning with a 1st grader showed me just how many ways a computer can get screwed up by random impresses.

[formerly_proven]

Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen; just bringing up task manager doesn't change anything.

[Arainach]

It sounds like you've installed some sort of app with a low level keyboard hook that's discarding the input. The login screen is in a separate desktop and not subject to such meddling. If it was an accessibility tool it might be able to hook into the login screen, I forget.

[not1ofU]

A couple of things to try that may help:

Alt+Tab (switch between open programs) - might help change the focus

Windows 10 has an advanced version of ^ as I understand, which uses the key combo: Win + Tab. The cycle of these commands can be reversed by adding "shift" to the mix (in case of many open programs / windows and you dont want to cycle through all of them)

Win+x has different, but equally useful menus for win 8 / win 10 - I was overjoyed when i first discovered this, as it retired many many other shortcuts I used over the years. (to get to device manager / control panel / event viewer)

and if all else fails: Alt+F4 - closes active (focused) program / window. If no programs or windows are in focus, then it will bring up the "shut down" dialog box, which allows for reboot / signout / shutdown / Switch user / sleep and hibernation if its enabled.

[dreamcompiler]

MacOS has had a similar issue as far back as 10.7. In 10.6 and before if you see a window with red, green, and yellow buttons in the corner, that window has focus, period. It was an enforced invariant.

In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying. There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple doesn't recognize as a bug.

[nitrogen]

Could you have something running with an invisible window, e.g. keylogger? Less scrupulous friends from way back used to talk about writing such things.

[ctraynor]

The reason why this will fix it is because Ctrl+Alt+Delete has a higher level of system interrupt than alternate ways to get to task manager. Ctrl+Alt+Delete fixes a surprising number of issues by interrupting runaway issues.

[rawling]

My favourite W10 bug is that if I maximise an Office window and then try to close it by mashing the mouse right into the top right corner, it actually clicks past and closes whatever window is underneath.

[johnsoft]

I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout, then log back in.

[Rd6n6]

Button presses are often handled by state machines at a driver level so that a single “press” only registers as a single press. Otherwise, it will register as a lot of presses because the physical switches bounce on contact. They call this debouncing. Probably, a drivers state machine did not transition out

[dbatten]

This doesn't seem to explain how it would happen after plugging in a new keyboard, or trying to use the on-screen keyboard, though...

[Nextgrid]

Pretty sure this would be done at the hardware level, as otherwise this behavior would differ between the BIOS, Windows, Linux & Mac. As far as I know no such debouncing code exists in operating systems for HID keyboards.

[a1369209993]

> One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.

> It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

On Ubuntu, that would be:

  $ Q=$($(echo /usr/bin/*rintf) \\x70)
  $ echo hel$Q
  help

right?

[justinsaccount]

  $ echo hel$'\x70'
  help

[da_chicken]

I have actually seen this before. It wasn't the P key; it was a different key. X or C, I think. However, the symptoms otherwise seem to match. I don't remember if we tried a second keyboard, but we definitely tried the on-screen keyboard and were confused when it, too, didn't work.

The only things we could guess were something related to the Windows Search, Cortana, or telemetry services. Unfortunately, it's been since the early days of Win10 since that happened so I don't remember any other details. We also had to physically restart the system to fix the problem.

[not1ofU]

Meanwhile a printer somewhere was unloading a rainforest worth of paper all over the place.

(thinking your CTRL key was stuck and activating the print shortcut, but unplugging the keyboard rules that out)

[vvatermelone]

I've been having bizarrely similar issues with my XPS lately, except that none of the keys work except the i key, even with the on-screen keyboard. Only happens once in a blue moon, but as in your case, requires a hard reset.

[drewzero1]

Wow, I'd nearly forgotten about this. The exact same thing happened to my sister-in-law a few years ago when she visited with her Windows 10 laptop and couldn't connect to our wifi.

Eventually we figured out the 'p' (or maybe it was 'n'? Can't remember for sure.) in the password was getting skipped, but it was hard to tell with the password masking. Tried a USB keyboard, onscreen keyboard, same thing. I think we might have given up and let her use one of our computers at that point. It was (and still is) very confusing.

[sixothree]

My first thought would be one of those mouse sharing programs (synergy, multipliciy, mouse without borders). They really screw up _everything_.

Nothing sucks like mouse without borders. Nothing. Except for Synergy which is worse. But nothing sucks like synergy. Well except Multiplicity.