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Weird Right Shift Behavior

edited February 2015 in General
This one's been bothering me for a while. Friend does weird thing to her computer, doesn't know what, and now any time she presses the Right Shift key, the active window pulls away and sort of looks like Expose, but isn't. Here's a picture of me trying to use TextEdit (couldn't take a screenshot since pressing any key ends this behavior):

i59.tinypic.com/wsvk7b.jpg

The left Command key causes all open windows to fly up above the viewable area, as if activating some 'show desktop' feature. I've already gone through all the Keyboard shortcuts and reset everything. Her keyboard works fine otherwise, and another keyboard shows the same symptoms, meaning it's not the keyboard. I couldn't find any obvious keyboard shortcut alternative programs installed on her computer, so I'm really not sure what's causing this. Any ideas?

Comments

  • Thanks for the post!

    First off, what computer do you have? I'm assuming probably an iMac, since you mentioned being able to swap keyboards?

    My first thought is that maybe some kind of accessibility option is enabled. I'd go to System Preferences, then Accessibility, and see if Sticky Keys or some other feature is enabled. Then I'd reset the PRAM and PMU and see if that makes a difference.

    Obviously it's important to determine whether we're looking at a hardware or software problem. The best way I can think of to do this is to boot from another volume -- an external hard drive, etc. If you can manage to boot to another hard drive or another volume and the behavior still occurs, you know it's a hardware problem, and if it doesn't, you know it's due to a setting on the volume you're booting to.

    If it was a laptop I'd guess it's just a bad keyboard, since fried keyboards do crazy things like that all the time, but the fact it's probably a desktop and you've tried another keyboard throw that out.

    Let me know if any of this works!

    Thanks,

    John
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