Got back from our Switzaly trip, and fired up the PC. After a while, a constant stream of “+89” characters started being sent to all active windows, not surprisingly causing random havoc with all displays, such as zooming in all web tabs. putting a stream of +89 characters into search fields or open documents. And then it would quieten down, giving a change to manually reset things because it was impossible to trigger a reboot as the Start menu selector was full of +89s… Then there would be a period of calm, before it all kicked off again…
What the hell was wrong with the keyboard?! I tried new batteries, but that didn’t fix it; looked for stuck keys, but there were none; cleaned out any inter-key gunge but still no joy. So totally puzzled about what was going on. Then, one time, I had the batteries out of the keyboard – and the +89s still started being generated! WTF?!! What could have been generating the characters if it wasn’t the keyboard? And why was it happening after the PC had been powered off for 10 days?
Eventually, I decided to try one of the two old keyboards I have hidden away. And when I got out the old wifi one, I noticed that it was powered on – even though it had not been used in months or maybe years! I could see no on/off switch on it, so just took out one of the batteries – and the +89s never returned… How the hell did it have power after such a long layoff? And it was not causing this problem before we went away, so it can’t have been powered on before? So, even though there was no wifi hub for that keyboard in the PC, somehow Windows must have been picking up some sort of signal from it and interpreting it as a never-ending stream of +89s! Spooky – and utter madness! Anyway, it’s been 24 hours with no recurrence, so job’s a good ‘un, I guess…