keyboard randomly locking up

[darw_n]

on my girls comp, she has had none stop problems with her keyboards.

she started with a logitec wireless, after a while, it wouldn't respond. broke out the old generic IBM PS/2 keyboard, and after a few minutes, it would fail.

The only way to get it to work was to remove it from device manager, scan for hardsware changes, let winXPpro install it again, then *not* reboot when it prompted (rebooting would result in the same issues).

Now, the PS/2 keyboard wont uninstall at all, and is totally locked up, and the only thing that works is this cheapo USB keyboard (for now)

now, what would cause this? I have never had serious issues with keyboards before, and have no idea where to look.

There is no event logs about anything really in xp manager.

Nor where there any hardware changes when this started.

thanks for any input

 

[wwparrish]

hmm, all I can do is take a guess.

wonder if the PS2 keyboard connector normally soldered to the motherboard has broke loose. I have seen where strain on the KB cable at the back of the machine has caused that connector to crack/break some of the solder joints holding it on the motherboard. With a wireless keyboard as the first keyboard on the machine I know this sounds farfetched but frankly can not think of much else to try.

(I am assuming you can take the IBM keyboard over to another machine and it works fine)

Plug in the ibm keyboard (machine off) and give the plug a wiggle test. It should be pretty firm with no slop. If it does "wiggle" the good news is a touch up with a soldering iron where the connector is/was soldered to the motherboard will probally fix it. Might be worth resoldering those joints anyway. Bad news is you will have to take the machine apart to get to them.

 

[darw_n]

checked that, everything is fine, and it seems like something within windows.

when it forst started, device manager had the good ol' yellow exclaimation point saying device could not start. but I could uninstall it in device manager, then scan for changes, and everything would work fine, *so long as I did not reboot* which is weird since I can't remember any time I had to reboot winXP for a keyboard. Now, I can't even remove the keyboard from device manager, but it says the device is working properly.

There is power to it, num lock led is lit.

my only guess is that there is an irq conflict, but I can't find anything, and that seems very unlikely.

BTW, the mobo is a gigabyte duali board (can't see the model # anywhere, and she threw the box out)

but I doubt model # is even important since PS/2 circuitry has to be pretty similar from board to board.

anyone have any idea where in xp pro sp2 to look?

are there any caps I should be studying?

thanks

 

[wwparrish]

one more guess, wonder if the logitech wireless had a driver that is making the IBM sick ? Any chance there is some logitech software in the installed programs list that should be deleted now that that keyboard is gone ? Even if not listed I would suspect a logitech driver is getting loaded back from the driver database perhaps ?

Thats all I got, best of luck.