03-25-2008, 07:34 PM

Can anyone help me out. I'm having problems with my iMac's wireless keyboard (small alu model). It has been working fine for over six months, but today the batteries ran done and when I replaced them I'm having some problems. The symptoms I'm getting are identical to this ...

http://whirlpool.net.au/forum-replie...fm/914345.html

in that when I type I'm just getting greek characters. When in Finder, pressing esc brings up Force Quit, pressing d hides the dock. This led me to believe that the alt and cmd keys are stuck (since alt+cmd+d hides the dock and alt+cmd+esc is for force quit). Launching keyboard viewer, this confirms that situation.

Now is where it starts to get weird. If I connect to the iMac from my Macbook via screen sharing, I can type normally using the Macbook's keyboard (despite keyboard viewer still showing alt+cmd as pressed). This suggests that the software is running fine. Next step - pair the keyboard with my macbook. When I do this, it works fine - no problems at all!

Has anyone got any ideas on what can be going wrong with this? I've tried the following:

Changing the batteries in the keyboard
Leaving the keyboard powered off for 10 minutes
Checking the keys for any stickyness (ssure this can't be the case anyway as it works fine when paired with the macbook)
Delete and reinstate the bluetooth pairing with the imac (with reboots in between)
Reboot the iMac
Reset the PRAM
Change language layout from and to British

Has anyonen got any other suggestions, or seen this problem before? I don't have a usb keyboard to test, so I'm not sure if the screen sharing connection from the macbook is valid (since it's using vnc rather than a keyboard driver). Is there a way I can reinstall the keyboard driver / factory reset the keyboard / do anything to get this working again???

help appreciated.

03-26-2008, 01:37 AM

Have you got the latest keyboard software installed? If running Leopard are the Preferences Panes showing updates September 24 for Keyboard and October 10 for Bluetooth?

03-26-2008, 05:51 AM

I am indeed running leopard. Looking in system preferences, I don't see either of those updates, yet when I run System Update it says I don't need anything. I tried download the Keyboard Software 1.2 and installing it, but when I do it says that I already have a newer version installed :S

03-26-2008, 07:57 PM

I've now purchased and plugged in a USB keyboard, but am getting the same symptoms with it, so it now points at being a software problem with Leopard on my iMac .... any ideas?

04-01-2008, 01:52 PM

ok, I got to the bottom of my problem ....

having reinstalled my iMac completely (pita!) everything was running gloriously until a few minutes ago when I installed the driver for my Wacom Intuos3 tablet. A few minutes after installing it the problem of 'stuck' keys returned. By screen sharing to my iMac from my MacBook I was able to uninstall the Wacom driver and, lo and behold, everything worked again!!

Just to be sure I tried installing the driver again - the problem came back, and uninstalling it - the problem went away!

Has anyone else come across the problem? If I can't install the Wacom driver then I can't configure my tablet properly, but I can't believe there is a driver out in the wild which causes such a problem ....