Re: Curious behavior of two shifting keys

["R Tennenbaum"]

Some keyboard problems with fixpacks were posted on usenet some months
ago, just around the time I started having them. The remedy then was
to backlevel IBMKBD.SYS located in \OS2\BOOT\. It worked for me.
Either you can unpack it from your pre-fixpacked archives, or you can
get it off the original cd-rom...

--Rafe T.
raphaelt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.ray-field.com

On Fri, 25 Sep 1998 18:10:22, Robert Hemenway wrote:

>The left Alt (56) and right Ctrl (99) keys have been acting a little
>strangely ever since I
>upgraded to XyW 4.017 last April and added FixPak 6 to OS/2 Warp 4.
>
>When I hit left Alt together with left Shift, or when I hit right Ctrl
>together with right Shift or with right Shift plus right Alt, the
>combination doesn't "take". That is, I get the Shift table key assignment,
>or the Shift+Alt table key assignment and nopt what I want. BUT if I hit
>the keys arpeggio style, so that the misbehaving key has a moment to
>respond, all is well. Otherwise, the performance of those two keys is
>erratic . Only those two keys, and erratic only in these combinations--left
>AS, right CS or CSA.
>
>My computer is slow, a 486/33, though I can't see that speed is relevant. I
>use the Northgate OmniKey Ultra still. The KBD shift state assignments for
>ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT are standard -- no difference between left and right.
>Changing the delay rate on the Omnikey board itself doesn't help. Changing
>the KBD_RATE_LOCK in DOS Properties from Off to On has no marked effect.
>And it's hardly practical to disable those two keys in the KBD file and use
>only the right Alt and the left Ctrl.
>
>In XyWin and in Nota Bene, running in OS/2's DOS, the keys are fine. The
>trouble is only in Xy 4.017.
>
>XyWrite 4.016 under WARP before the FixPak was fine, and v. 4.017 is fine
>in pure DOS, booted from a floppy. Under "virtual DOS" under OS/2 (booted
>from A but still under OS/2), the keys again misbehave.
>
>The trouble seems to be somehow in the interaction between WARP/FixPak 6 and
>XyW 4.017.
>
>No big deal. But a nuisance -- and it's easy to forget that arpeggio dodge.
>I've hesitated to bring it up. Well, it's a curious flaw, and I'm curious.
>
>Have any of you seen or heard of the like?
>
>Robert Hemenway