SOLVED Keyboard gone insaneve got it.

[Vince Massi]

Now I think that one of our kids, messing around with one of our laptops, did it. Several keyboard keys produce two symbols. The back key does not work, so I cannot erase the extra symbols. I ran Malwarebytes (even though I don't think that was the problem) and it found nothing. For about an hour and a half now, it has been trying to return to a System Restore Point.

I have cut and pasted the sfc /scannow command onto a text, dragged it onto a thumb drive, and will drag that into the PowerShell command line if the System Restore doesn't work.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Regedit32]

Try pressing Fn + Num Lock

Your kids or a pet may have engaged that accidently

My Mother's cat is aptly more than capable of placing ,my system into sleep mode when she decides its time to come sit on the keyboard.

I must try to train Cortana to bark when it detects abnormal keystroke activity

 

[Vince Massi]

System Restore took two hours but did not solve the keyboard problem.

Researching on the web, I tried cleaning it, tapping the Fn and other keys to see if they were stuck, and discovered that it doesn't have a Num Lock key.

The Hewlett-Packard site says that I need to replace the keyboard. Tomorrow I'll plug in a regular keyboard to the laptop and see if it works.

 

[Vince Massi]

It turned out that the keyboard has a hardware failure. I typed OSK for the onscreen keyboard, and it worked fine, showing that it is not a software problem.

Fortunately, I had a high-quality IBM external keyboard designed fow Windows XP that I could not get to work on 8. I plugged it in and it works great.