[nycbug-talk] Keystrokes being ignored (windows related)

[Jonathan Stewart]

jonathan at kc8onw.net wrote:
> I've twice recently run into an issue on windows machines where certain
> programs would just ignore all keystrokes other than enter unless the
> shift key was held down.  On both systems telnet after connection will
> ignore all keystrokes like above for no apparent reason and I've been
> using putty instead but now Cygwin/X xterm is doing the same thing and I
> really need to find out what is going on.
> 
> If anyone else has run into this and found a fix or has any ideas I would
> very much like to hear about it.

It turned out to be caused by a keylogger on old under protected
systems.  It spread over removable drives by creating autorun.inf,
copy.exe, and sqlserv.exe hidden system files in the root of the drive
and in the All Users Application Data area.  I don't know why holding
shift sort of made things work but either way everything is fine now.

Jonathan