Keyboard Lockups on Login

Brett Watson
Wed, 10 Sep 1997 23:50:41 -0000

There's been some chit-chat about keyboards locking up at the login
dialog. I'd like to point out that I've seen this behaviour in a totally
Samba-free environment. In our case, the symptoms include being able to
Tab between the fields, but all character keystrokes are dutifully
ignored. The environment is predominantly Win95 with NT4 servers. The
particular machine that I experienced it on was Win95 OSR2.

This might not be exactly the bug as experienced with Samba, which
suggests two things: firstly, this is strictly speaking a Win95 bug;
secondly, it seems to be triggered by SMB protocol interactions
(different servers produce different variations of the bug). I haven't
seen this behaviour lately -- perhaps we've been supplied an NT patch
which works around the problem? More likely I just haven't done enough
in-and-out-logging to trigger it (I normally remain logged in to one box
all day). I'll try to reproduce the problem sometime.

Finally, an off-topic note to Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton. Hot milk
with salt and vinegar crisps (chips to the rest of us) is a truly
horrible combination. You need an immediate patch applied to your
cullinary routines. Bleah!

Regards,
TFBW