Betalogue

I have been experiencing this weird problem in Panther for several days now, and I cannot find any cause for it. The symptoms are quite simple.

I start up my machine, and log in as my regular user name (with admin capabilities). I do my business for a while, and then encounter something that requires a return to the login window.

As soon as I reach the login window, something very wrong happens. The mouse still works fine, but most keys on the keyboard fail to work. The cursor keys still work, so I can go up and down the list of users to select the user I want, but if I then press the Return key to enter the password for the selected user, I get an alert sound and nothing happens. Ditto with the Enter key.

I can then use the mouse to click on the selected user instead. This bring me to the window where I need to enter my password. But I press the keys on the keyboard, and nothing happens in the password field. Nothing gets entered. And of course clicking on the “Login” button fails.

In other words, I cannot log back in. Since I can still use the mouse, I can go back to the previous login window (the one with the list of users and the Restart and Sleep buttons), but if I click on Sleep to put the computer into deep sleep, when I wake up the computer after that, the problem is still there. I still can’t type in anything.

All I can do is click on Restart. A complete restart of the machine cures the problem. It brings me back to the login window, and this time I can use the keyboard to enter my password and log in. But even if I just log in holding the Shift key down (which prevents my startup items from launching) and then log back out immediately, the same problem happens again. No keyboard (except for the cursor keys). So it’s hard to suspect a third-party software application or utility.

I’ve tried unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in. Doesn’t do anything. The only thing that works is restarting the machine. Rather annoying!

I guess the next step is to eliminate all my USB devices and rebuild my USB environment one device at a time. Mmm — I have better things to do! :-(

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, December 1st, 2003 at 6:18 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.