Keyboard Skipping in Internet Explorer

For my first post I thought that I'd write about a problem that I had at work today. A customer was having a problem with his keyboard randomly skipping keys. The problem only occurred when he was using Internet Explorer. Therefore, we could easily conclude that the problem was not hardware related. Otherwise the keyboard would skip no matter the application in use. We could also conclude that the problem must be related to Internet Explorer.

Since the user had a lot of tool bars installed, I suspected the problem was related to an Add-on. Internet Explorer 7 introduced a feature that allows it to be started without any of the Add-ons loaded. To accomplish this:

Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Internet Explorer(No Add-ons)

This proved my suspicion. The keyboard worked perfectly.

Next, I needed to figure out which of the Add-ons was causing the problem. To do this:

Tools>Manage Add-ons...>Select an Add-on>Select 'Disable'

One way to find our problem Add-on would be to disable each Add-on one-by-one until the offending Add-on is revealed. This may indeed be the only way.

If you know that an Add-on has been recently installed in Internet Explorer or for some reason you have a 'bad feeling' about one of the Add-ons, this would, obviously, be the place to start. Otherwise, disable them one at a time until the problem is resolved.