After I’ve been on my computer for a while (Win98, IE5), especially on the web, sometimes it freezes up, and then when it unfreezes an odd thing happens:
It acts as though the shift key is pressed down permanently, in Explorer highlighting everything and in IE highlighting the contents of the address bar if you click there
Welcome to the insect riddled world of windoze.
If you can consistently or semi-consistently get the “bug” to reappear, you can report it (to Microsoft.)
Actually, clicking on the IE5 address bar always highlights/selects the contents–it’s a feature, not a bug.
As for the freezing up problem you’re describing, I’m more inclined to think that’s a hardware conflict of some sort–maybe even something as simple as too little memory. This was (is) the case on my previous computer–IE5 froze frequently due to low memory. Or it could be something on the hard drive–I would try running Scandisk and Defragmenter before worrying about the memory.
Anyway, in my experience the easiest way to recover after a freeze-up is to simply restart the computer by a)pressing the reset button on the front of the CPU or b)turning off the CPU power, giving it about a minute to ‘cool down’, and then turn it back on.
I get that a lot too. Not only that, I often get something where it acts as if the Alt key or Windows key were being held down. I don’t think it’s any hardware conflict (Device Manager shows nothing wrong, and it only happens with IE5), and I don’t think it’s lack of memory (I have 128MB).
I have no idea what causes it, but often the solution is as simple as pressing the key in question (Alt, Shift, whatever) rapidly twice in a row.
In my new computer I also have that same problem with my shift key.
It makes playing Doom with the keyboard a pain in the ass, because it always thinks I’m running.
The problem isn’t physically with the key. however; in fact, just as a test, I REMOVED THE KEY and it still got “stuck!”
The problem has something to do with the fact that for every keypress, two signals must be passed to the computer; one number being the key’s numerical code (in the case of shift, 42 for the left shift and 54 for the right shift), which tells the computer that the key has been pressed, and another code that is the value of the key + 128, which tells the computer that the key has stopped being pressed. It apparently fails to do the latter. Must have something to do with the fact that there are 2 shift keys, also.
Aaaanyway, I have figured out that if my shift key gets “stuck” (which it does VERY OFTEN, and I need to get a new keyboard!) I just press and release my left shift key (okay, more like pounding on it in rage in my case. :o) and the problem sort of goes away.
That annoys the hell out of me, but is it by far not the most annoying computer problem I’ve ever had.
If the suggestions above don’t work, you might try downloading Netscape (it’s free) and seeing if that doesn’t solve you internet browsing problems.