7 ms·

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. Type

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 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)
- dEnigma 5y ago
  Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.
  - lardolan 5y ago
    Same here. Thought about NOPE
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Reminds me of the drinking game called the "Land of Nod", you go in a circle making claims like "you can live in the Land of Nod, but you can't die there" or "you can listen to Nirvana in the Land of Nod, but not Dave Grohl" and hand out penalties of two fingers of your pint every time someone makes a statement that doesn't fit the rule. The only advice you give them is "the clue is in the name". You can only play this game once with a particular group, but it's a good laugh.
    - psd1 5y ago
      Ha, I've played a similar game! Not sure I should spoil it but let's say that the mark ends up fixated on information from the audio channel
- civilized 5y ago
  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!"
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I was going to go with no p probably indicating an enlarged prostate.
dr-detroit 5y ago
funny joke. seriously imagine the large teams of people it would take to meet your companies security standard practices if you decided to install lolbuntu.
atribecalledqst 5y ago
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_ 5y ago
  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?)).
  - Gaelan 5y ago
    > (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)) When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.
  - js2 5y ago
    Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard. I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled. This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting. ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT. BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?
    - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
      Lots of old documents with rules about writing ridiculously large parts of them in ALL CAPS. For no reason at all, that I can determine.
formerly_proven 5y ago
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.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  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.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  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.
- johnsoft 5y ago
  I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout, then log back in.
  - not1ofU 5y ago
    Doesn't Win+L lock the screen?
    - johnsoft 5y ago
      You're right, I used the word "logout" imprecisely. I meant "lock".
- 5y ago
sixothree 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
not1ofU 5y ago
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)
Rd6n6 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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...
  - Rd6n6 5y ago
    Same generic keyboard debouncing in use in all 3 instances on the windows end? I know windows drivers debounce mouse clicks because I had a really old mouse that would double and triple click by accident on Linux but not in windows. I might be wrong, but changing the device might not affect it if the different devices are handled by shared runtime code
    - ayewo 5y ago
      Sounds like a reasonable explanation for physical keyboards—if the new keyboard used by the OP was identical to the keyboard on their machine, I can see how Windows might reuse the same device driver instance since it has already been loaded into memory. But what about the on-screen keyboard? Do on-screen key presses get routed through the keyboard device driver too?
      - Rd6n6 5y ago
        So fingers bounce when they touch a screen? I wrote a capacitive touch driver once back in uni and we debounced that. I don’t know how windows does it, I’m speculating
        gpm 5y ago
t-writescode 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious ways.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    like maybe changing a key in some hashmap
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Well, bit flips happen all the time, and we call that "cosmic rays". It is not obvious that bit flips from cosmic rays in the more usual sense of "cosmic rays" happen all the time.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      That's actually testable and determinable from several perspetives. - Isolate any other sources of ionising radiation. - Check to see if prevalence increases or decreases with increased or decreased cosmic ray exposure (atitude, shielding, detected cosmic ray storms). - Are the characteristics those of single-bit flips? (E.g., power-of-two changes to values, or similar.) - Are the errors nott repeated for the same hardware component. (E.g., under increased cosmic-ray influence, bits flip at an increased rate, as predicted, but which bits flip is random and has no detectable pattern, as predicted.) You end up with very strong circumstantial evidence of altered bits due to cosmic ray influence. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-flip https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-f... https://youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8
vvatermelone 5y ago
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.
a1369209993 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  $ echo hel$'\x70' help
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    Oh, neat. It's `echo hel$\x70` in my shell, but I didn't know bash had a similar mechanism.
    - belgesel 5y ago
      even echo has it $ echo -e "hel\x70"
da_chicken 5y ago
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.
drewzero1 5y ago
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.

Intermernet 5y ago

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

dEnigma 5y ago
Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.
- lardolan 5y ago
  Same here. Thought about NOPE
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Reminds me of the drinking game called the "Land of Nod", you go in a circle making claims like "you can live in the Land of Nod, but you can't die there" or "you can listen to Nirvana in the Land of Nod, but not Dave Grohl" and hand out penalties of two fingers of your pint every time someone makes a statement that doesn't fit the rule. The only advice you give them is "the clue is in the name". You can only play this game once with a particular group, but it's a good laugh.
  - psd1 5y ago
    Ha, I've played a similar game! Not sure I should spoil it but let's say that the mark ends up fixated on information from the audio channel
civilized 5y ago
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!"
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I was going to go with no p probably indicating an enlarged prostate.

dr-detroit 5y ago

funny joke. seriously imagine the large teams of people it would take to meet your companies security standard practices if you decided to install lolbuntu.

atribecalledqst 5y ago

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_ 5y ago
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?)).
- Gaelan 5y ago
  > (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)) When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.
- js2 5y ago
  Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard. I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled. This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting. ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT. BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?
  - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
    Lots of old documents with rules about writing ridiculously large parts of them in ALL CAPS. For no reason at all, that I can determine.

formerly_proven 5y ago

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.

nitrogen 5y ago
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.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
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.
johnsoft 5y ago
I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout, then log back in.
- not1ofU 5y ago
  Doesn't Win+L lock the screen?
  - johnsoft 5y ago
    You're right, I used the word "logout" imprecisely. I meant "lock".
5y ago

sixothree 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

not1ofU 5y ago

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)

Rd6n6 5y ago

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 5y ago
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...
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Same generic keyboard debouncing in use in all 3 instances on the windows end? I know windows drivers debounce mouse clicks because I had a really old mouse that would double and triple click by accident on Linux but not in windows. I might be wrong, but changing the device might not affect it if the different devices are handled by shared runtime code
  - ayewo 5y ago
    Sounds like a reasonable explanation for physical keyboards—if the new keyboard used by the OP was identical to the keyboard on their machine, I can see how Windows might reuse the same device driver instance since it has already been loaded into memory. But what about the on-screen keyboard? Do on-screen key presses get routed through the keyboard device driver too?
    - Rd6n6 5y ago
      So fingers bounce when they touch a screen? I wrote a capacitive touch driver once back in uni and we debounced that. I don’t know how windows does it, I’m speculating
      - gpm 5y ago

t-writescode 5y ago

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 5y ago
Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious ways.
- asddubs 5y ago
  like maybe changing a key in some hashmap
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Well, bit flips happen all the time, and we call that "cosmic rays". It is not obvious that bit flips from cosmic rays in the more usual sense of "cosmic rays" happen all the time.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    That's actually testable and determinable from several perspetives. - Isolate any other sources of ionising radiation. - Check to see if prevalence increases or decreases with increased or decreased cosmic ray exposure (atitude, shielding, detected cosmic ray storms). - Are the characteristics those of single-bit flips? (E.g., power-of-two changes to values, or similar.) - Are the errors nott repeated for the same hardware component. (E.g., under increased cosmic-ray influence, bits flip at an increased rate, as predicted, but which bits flip is random and has no detectable pattern, as predicted.) You end up with very strong circumstantial evidence of altered bits due to cosmic ray influence. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-flip https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-f... https://youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8

vvatermelone 5y ago

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.

a1369209993 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
$ echo hel$'\x70' help
- a1369209993 5y ago
  Oh, neat. It's `echo hel$\x70` in my shell, but I didn't know bash had a similar mechanism.
  - belgesel 5y ago
    even echo has it $ echo -e "hel\x70"

da_chicken 5y ago

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.

drewzero1 5y ago

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.