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Pressing <ALT>+<ARROW_KEYS> in Visual Studio editor writes single ASCII character

I am using VS2013 as my IDE and ever since I installed it acts very oddly when pressing ALT and any of the ARROW keys. I use ALT+LEFT and ALT+RIGHT to navigate backward/forward which works in principal but once VS completes the jump it writes out a single character.

This is before the jump:

before the jump

This is after the jump/after pressing ALT+LEFT: after the jump

Those are the characters that are being written:

  • ALT+UP: ◘
  • ALT+RIGHT: ♠
  • ALT+DOWN: ☻
  • ALT+LEFT: ♦

I am using VS2013 at work as well all the time and I have never seen this before. I know that pressing ALT+NUMPAD_KEYS produces ASCII characters but why is that happening for my arrow keys and only in VS? Apparently ALT+UP for me is the same as pressing ALT+6 (http://www.irongeek.com/alt-numpad-ascii-key-combos-and-chart.html). I actually swapped out my keyboard to see if its got anything to do with that. No joy.

Any ideas?

Update 1:
Looks like this fellow has a similar issue but with Eclipse on Windows:
https://superuser.com/questions/668394/turn-off-alt-numeric-keypad-ascii-symbol-insertion
Sadly no answers to his post.

Update 2/Solution:

As per the comment of 'Hans Passant' I found a solution. See below for details.

like image 714
Sven M. Avatar asked Dec 20 '14 02:12

Sven M.


1 Answers

I have found the cause thanks to Hans Passant.

I did a diagnostic boot and discovered the issue even then still persisted. I then went on to kill all remaining processes until I struck gold:

the bad guy

With this process gone ALT+ARROW_KEYS don't trigger ASCII symbol insertion anymore. I ended up doing two things in total to get rid of this process:

  1. Reinstalled .NET Framework 4.5.1
  2. Renamed/Removed this file: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\RegSvcs.exe

On booting into Windows there are neither errors pertaining to that particular executable nor have I noticed any other malfunctions. Just to be sure, I ran a couple of virus/malware removal tools. They all came up with no threats.

like image 112
Sven M. Avatar answered Dec 31 '22 13:12

Sven M.