My left and right arrow keys are acting up again. It gets a bit annoying when I’m typing and want to go back a space or two, but can’t use my arrow keys. Instead I have to use my touch pad, drag the cursor aaaaaall the way over, click, type type type, then move it aaaaall the way back. Also scrolling from left to right on webpages gets annoying. I have to use this pesky touch pad too much. No, it’s not nearly as much of a chore as I’m making it seem, but using my arrow keys would be a bit more convenient. Is there anything I can do to stop this malfunction without restarting my computer? I know I’m not having any major issues since this has happened before. I good restart has always done the trick, but I’d rather avoid one this time. In case this helps, I’m running WinXP on an HP. Thankies.
You can TRY logging out, rather than restarting. It’s a bit quicker, but still unloads drivers and reloads fresh copies and the like.
Can you clean under the actual, physical keys? I abuse the hell out of my kb and occasionally it fights back 
Plugging an inexpensive ($ 15.00 or so) external USB or PS2 keyboard in would be your best solution.
Clean out your board a bit. Also, try smacking the various “function” keys shift, alt, ctrl etc. Sometimes just they stick and affect your other keys.
I don’t know if this happens with XP, but sometimes Windows gets into a state where it thinks the ALT key is down, even though it isn’t. When that happens, you can fix it by tapping the ALT key.
Heh, my keys aren’t dirty. It’s just that sometimes the left and right keys want to act like little jerks and stop working on me. They’re working again now and I didn’t even do anything. Thanks, guys. I’ll try some of this stuff next time my keyboard goes haywire (because it will again soon).
Stop: Hammer time
Or, if its a microsoft keyboard, check to see if there are updated drivers.