PgUp, PgDn, and right/left up/down arrows timing out

[OpticsGuy]

The PgUp, PgDn, and right/left and up/down arrows on my W500 stop functioning after roughly 5 minutes with at least four applications (PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint 2003 reader, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Bridge) , but can be "reactivated" to work for another 5 or so min. each time by either hitting 'Enter', or left-clicking on the mouse.  For example, within Powerpoint I can use the, say, up and down arrows to step forward and backward through the presentation, but these keys cease functioning within 5 minutes.  Pressing them (or the PgUp or PgDn) ceases to have an effect once this period has passed. This happens whether or not I am actively clicking every 15 sec. or so, or if I make no new inputs for 5 min.  Another problem that is probably related is that if I set up a slideshow in Adobe Lightroom 2 to run automatically  it runs for a few minutes (i.e. it sequentially puts one slide after another on the screen), but the program jumps back to the main screen after a few minutes, in the middle of the slide show, again with the arrow and Pg keys "dead" at this point.  All of this happens when using the laptop alone, or when using Presentation Director along with a projector (with the settings on the Thinkpad to disable timers, screen saver, etc.). 

[ZPrime]

You have something else on the laptop (not part of the factory preload) that is causing you problems.  I have no such issues...  It's not hardware since it's only happening with certain apps for you.

Download and burn a Linux "live CD" (like Ubuntu) and see if you have the same problem there - this will totally rule out hardware for you.

[OpticsGuy]

Thanks for your input.   I'm leaving for Europe in the morning so won't be able to try your suggestion until I return in a week.  FYI, I only listed four programs, two Microsoft and two Adobe, to indicate the issue wasn't limited to a specific set of software.  For what it's worth, other than the Office 2007 applications, the software on my W500 is a subset of the software that ran without problem on my T43p that it replaces (a subset because I don't need software for an external USB webcam, an old scanner, etc.).  Assuming the problem is caused by some piece of software running in the background, does anyone have some good ways of finding the bad actor?

[Agotthelf]

Hello OpticsGuy,

please look in your event manager for exclamation entries, with timestamps when keys are stuck.

Which  model, OS and which Antivirus and Firewall do you use?

Regards

Andreas

[OpticsGuy]

Thanks very much for the suggestions. They (indirectly) resulted in me tracking down the solution on my flight to Europe today. In case someone has this same problem in the future, note that I ordered my W500 from the factory “upgraded” to XP, instead of Vista, with it fully loaded with the fastest processor, most memory, etc. that was available as of late August 2008. To make a long story short, I ran MSCONFIG and unchecked (disabled) the following seven programs from the Startup menu: Shuttlehelper, DMX Launcher and RoxwatchTray10 (both Roxio), iTunesHelper, OpwareSE2 and SSBduplicate (both Scansoft), and RetroExpress. After rebooting, the problem appears to be fixed. Apparently, in doing whatever jobs they thought they needed to be doing, one of these seven programs was grabbing the keys in question and disabling them. Since I can’t think of any good reason any of these programs needs to be installed at startup, I won’t go through them one-by-one to try to find which one(s) was the culprit. Anyway, it appears the problem is now solved.

[OpticsGuy · Accepted solution]

Even though I've already posted the solution to this problem, it just reoccurred, and as a result I've found the problem is caused by iTunesHelper.exe.  Earlier today I was prompted to download the latest version of iTunes.  I did so, but deferred rebooting my computer until later.  In the mean time I was using PowerPoint and the same keys as before became disabled after a period of a few minutes (and again re-enabled for a few minutes by left clicking the "mouse").  I checked the startup menu using msconfig and discovered iTunesHelper.exe had been reinstalled.  Even though I had not yet rebooted my machine, still the keys were being deactivated after.  I unchecked the box next to iTuneshelper, rebooted, and the problem has disappeared again.  Note that actually running iTunes (which I subsequently did) does not cause the problem to reappear.  Unfortunately, this is something that has to be kept in mind each time a new version of iTunes is installed.