How can I disable the right CTRL key on my Windows 11 laptop?

Factual Questions
1

I have been doing some hardware house cleaning the last few days. I had a Toshiba Satellite C-50 with a failed boot HDD and another Toshiba with a failed mainboard, but a functioning SSD. So I scavenged that laptop for the SSD and also additional RAM, put it in the laptop with the functioning board and did a fresh install of Windows 11 (from a thumb drive created with Rufus, because the hardware is so old that it normally wouldn’t install Win 11). Everything worked like a charm, but I soon noticed that the keyboard is wonky.

The keyboard erratically adds dashes, so I first thought that the dash key was the culprit. But it’s not, strangely the right CTRL key is the offender and for some reason doesn’t work as intended, but creates dashes, and worst of all, repeatedly. So typing on this machine is almost impossible.

So I thought about remapping the right CTRL key to nothing and thus disabling it. The first solution I found about disabling/remapping keys was a Youtube video that recommended Microsoft Power Toys which contains a keyboard manager. I installed it but soon noticed that it’s no help, because you can remap certain shortcuts, but not individual keys like I need to. Other solutions I found on the web like changing the registry to remap keys had the same problem, i. e. they could disable both CTRL keys, but not one single one of them.

So I’m turning to you, fellow IT dopers.

2

You can change the key mapping on your keyboard with a lightweight free product called KeyTweak. It can remap arbitrary individual keys, and can disable individual keys.

It works very well, and doesn’t even need to be memory-resident – all it does is make registry changes and Windows itself actually does all the work. But it’s a very handy UI to achieve what otherwise would be pretty obscure registry changes.

3

Thank you very much, KeyTweak did the trick. No issues anymore with the misbehaving CTRL key.

4

Happy to help! Every once in a while there’s a nifty little free product like this that make you wonder, why didn’t Microsoft provide something like this?

5

I think they don’t trust their users with more advanced tweaks like this. That’s why they also have been dumbing down the control panel since Win 8.

6

I wonder whether you could use this key tweak to remap the ctrl key to ctrl.

I have an app that remaps the right alt key to allow me to easily enter foreign accents and the like

7

You should be able to. It overrides the specific key scan codes to anything else.

Though for your use case maybe the international English keyboard would work similarly? You can also find European or Asian keyboards with an AltGr key for that purpose.

8

Maybe that could work, but wouldn’t help me much. The right CTRL key wasn’t only mapped wrongly, but there seems to be a mechanical or electrical problem that activated it most of the time without pressing it. So disabling it completely was the best solution. I only reassembled this laptop as a backup for my main machine, so I won’t use it much, and it still has a functioning left CTRL key.

9

Simple rule of thumb with Microsoft’s Windows and Office… If it’s useful, or even necessary, Microsoft will either hide it or delete it in the next version.

10

Next time it occurs, perform a three finger salute: Ctrl+Alt+Del
This, among other things, clears the keyboard buffer and key-held flags. It cleared up a very frustrating problem for me once.

11

That way is much easier and less messy than gluing something under the key so you can’t push it down.