Visual Studio Stuck in Weird Mode Causing Keyboard Issues

Question

This has happened to me in other versions of Visual Studio, but it' been happening a lot lately in VS.NET 2010. I'm sure the fix is simple, but I do not know what it is and it's driving me nuts.

I'll be working in VS.NET and then all of a sudden I can't click with the mouse to go to a point in the code. I don't get the cursor. All it does is highlight entire words in grey whenever I try to change the cursor position. And then typing doesn't work or it's quirky. The only thing I've noticed is in the VS.NET status bar. It says something like "...waiting for second key stroke after pressing CTRL + D...". I know CTRL + D is a VS.NET shortcut, so I press another key in the key combo just to try to get out of this mode. Today I pressed ENTER and it said, this is not a valid key combo. I was expecting to get out of the weird mode I was in, but nothing changed.

The only way I can fix it is to close VS.NET and load it up again. Not ideal and a waste of time.

Maybe it's not even related to the CTRL + D key stroke combo, but it's the only thing I notice when I'm stuck in this weird keyboard limbo mode. Like I said I'm sure it's simple to get out of this mode, just not sure how. Googling hasn't produced much.

Ideas anyone?

Yours truly,

CTRL+Shift+B

Answer 1

I have been able to clear this is the past by doing a CTRL + TAB to another page, then return to the original page. Seems to work without having to close the page.

Answer 2

I am not sure this is exactly related to your problem but I have also experienced strange behavior in Visual Studio 2010. I have tracked it down to the following:

SHIFT + WIN puts the editor in some kind of auto selection mode. Wherever I click the mouse button, the text between cursor position and the click gets selected. To get out of it press SHIFT

CONTROL + WIN puts the editor in a mode where it treats every mouse click as if CTRL is pressed. To get out of it, press CTRL.

The keys mentioned above has to be pressed simultaneous for this to work. I don't think this has to do with Windows Sticky Keys as I have that function disabled. It seems to be a Windows feature since this works system wide and is not isolated to Visual Studio only.