Randomly reassigning keyboard keys..?

This one totally baffles me. I have a Dell 8100 2GHz p4 running XP Home. Every time I boot, I have to check whether my keyboard works correctly. Keys get randomly re-assigned. (Right now, my main enter key does nothing, but the numeric keypad enter key works fine - earlier today, hitting number 9 produced a 7, and so on...)

I have uninstalled just about every piece of software on this machine except for the Dell installed defaults. I even uninstalled norton antvirus, no joy. (I have the latest updates, and no virus is present.)

When I boot, I know whether the problem is present as soon as I reach the logon screen - sometimes I can logon, sometimes I can't, depending on what keys are re-assigned this time.

Any ideas? Anyone come across this?

 

M$ has identified several kbd devices that don't do quite right with XP. Yours isn't among them but that may just mean they haven't been told about it yet. Or have been told but haven't published yet.

First thing I'd do is check device manager and see if it is reporting problems. Then check your event logs for occurances at reboot time and see if kbd issues are mentioned.

Next (if nothing from the above), try turning plug & pray off in the BIOS and see if the behavior changes. If so, there is for sure a hardware issue of some sort. You may need a BIOS update or a different device or something.