Digital Misfortunes: Remote desktop messes up keyboard layout of logon screen

It seems that lately I have been having a peak of digital troubles, which I have come to call "Digital Misfortunes". These are situations where programs or computers do not behave in the expected way and I have to utilize the "supernatural" powers that device driver development has given me in order to solve these problems.

So, since these things seem to happen more and more often I have created a new category in my blog, with that name exactly.

It really makes me sad to see that more and more problems keep coming up. What would a normal user do? Format and reinstall the OS? Most likely...

Here is a summary of some of my latest digital misfortunes:

• The wifi and ethernet ports of my laptop stop working. I think it is a hardware failure until a friend with the same laptop tells me he has the same trouble. It couldn't be a coincidence. The network adapters on 2 separate laptops getting damaged at the same time? No way...
  Uninstalling the wifi card and the ethernet card from Device Manager and then doing a "Scan for Hardware Changes" fixed the problem.
• My antivirus hits 100% CPU due to a silly utility generating a 10MB debug log on my disk in HTML format.
• If I put my brand new (6 months) Vista PC to sleep (standby) and then resume then the DVD drive is no longer "present". If I do a proper reboot it shows up again. I didn't have time to fix that yet.
• Just last night, Vista would not let me rename a folder on an external firewire disk for no apparent reason. After passing the UAC dialog I would get another silly dialog telling me "You need permission to do that ==> Retry - Cancel". I tried that several times but finally gave up.
  I had no open program or command shell using that folder and I could rename ANY folder below or above it in the folder hierarchy (folder tree), but not that one. I had to reboot so that I could finally rename the folder!
• The software of my mobile phone (that I run on the PC) informed me there was an upgrade that it could download for me. I agreed, the thing downloaded and crashed upon installation. Then of course it no longer worked. So I uninstalled it, then reinstalled the original, refused to upgrade, and worked fine for a while.
  Then I thought may be I should try again, this time starting up the program with admin priviledges (Vista). Now it upgraded but didn't work (could not connect to the phone). I uninstall and reinstall the original version once more and now it wouldn't connect either. As the average user would do, I start the software in "diagnostic" mode and everything works perfectly ever after...

• I try to do some kernel debugging from my laptop and get "Access Denied" when opening the Serial Port (USB2Serial) with WinDbg (the same with HyperTerminal of course). After trying to find who is the culprit (using Process Explorer and Handle) without result I start killing processes (bruteforce is my nickname) just to see who is blocking my serial port. I find one process that cannot be killed!!! I logoff and logon again and the process is still alive and kicking (with the same process id).
  I use AutoRuns to remove it from startup, restart my laptop and now the serial port is working fine once again. Btw, that process was the mobile phone utility software :-D

• I discover that everyone at the office is totally unable to connect to public shares on my PC although everything looks normal with the OS. As if that was a bad thing I start to fix it (I regreted that later...). The culprit? The CheckPoint client software that got installed when I installed some VPN software so that I could connect to the VPN of some client and debug their systems. It installed on my machine a strict policy from THEIR domain, which did not permit any file sharing of any sort.
  They were wise of course, but me being a great fool stopped the CheckPoint services so that I could share files again with my collaborators...

Anyway, just about 2 weeks ago I was hit by a particularly sweet one. So sweet and silly at the same time that it deserves its own post.

It was Sunday morning around 1pm. I was at the office packing my things and computers for a 4-day trip to Germany, for the 1394 Trade Association's plugfest (Interoperability Testing). My flight was at 4pm.

I had packed my test PC and as I was about to pack the cameras, being the test-obsessed guy that I am, I thought... "Hmmm let's do a final test with these cameras on the laptop before I pack them, just to make sure they are ok for the demos".

So I open up my laptop and start to login to Windows.

"Wrong Password".

I type again, a bit more careful this time.

"Wrong Password".

I type again, the characters one by one.

"Wrong Password".

What the heck? I connect through Remote Desktop and of course everything looks fine!!! I try to connect locally and... "Wrong Password". Darn!

Now just picture that: I have to be at the airport in about an hour, I haven't finished packing, and I cannot logon to my laptop!!! Sweeeeet!!!

I try to log on as local admin and in utter surprise find out that my keyboard cannot type the word "administrator". The keys are somehow messed up!!! Well, that explains the wrong password. I try to use the ALT+AsciiCode trick to type in the password, but it doesn't work. Things are really messed up.

Quickly I search Google for windows xp remote desktop keyboard layout and I see the following as the second result coming straight from the Microsoft KB: The default keyboard layout changes when you use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to a Windows XP-based computer.

Blast it!!! I had to debug a PC in the lab during the week and instead of moving it to my office as usual, I moved my laptop there and Remote Desktop'd to it to do the debugging...

I read the article quickly and I see that the issue has been corrected in XP SP3. But I HAVE the darn SP3 installed on the laptop and still get the problem!

Anyway, since I was pressed for time (and this is usually a bad advisor), I connected through Remote Desktop once again and created a local admin account with a name and pwd that contained letters I could type at the login screen. The funny thing is that when I login to that account the keyboard layout is fine. It is only messed in the logon screen. Anyway that suited my purposes. The laptop was operational once again.

The trick worked fine and for the next couple of days at the event I had no trouble.

Then I get back to home base and since I had tougher problems to debug, I decided to file a support incident to Microsoft Hellas for the keyboard layout issue (since it was a known problem in a previous version of the OS). A very intelligent and kind guy calls me two days later and we start to resolve the problem. Guess what... As I was rubber-ducking him (explaining the situation to the guy) I figure out a pattern and I notice that the failing keys are those that are "mapped" to the numeric keypad. Laptops don't have a numpad, so they map it somewhere in the middle of the keyboard. Then for example, if you press NumLock, 'M' produces 0, 'J' produces 1 etc.

That was the source of the trouble! The logon screen thought that the numlock was ON. I pressed NumLock once and my keyboard was fine...

To restore the NumLock to NOT being on, we just did the reverse of what the following KB article describes: How to enable the NUM LOCK key for the logon screen. The MS guy filed the bug and the case was closed.

The trouble was definitely caused by Remote Desktop since it happened again the next time I Remote Desktop'd to the laptop but now I knew what to do :-)

Anyway, if you want a tiny bit of extra security through obscurity on your laptop then enable NumLock on the logon screen, so most likely no 'friend' of yours can logon interactively to it while you are "away" from it. Trust me, you never know when this silly trick might prove useful...

So ladies and gents, the moral of this story: It saddens me to admit it but... computer technology is still soooooooo immature... So incomplete... So imperfect... So far from "usable by the average user". Maybe in about 10 years things will be much better.

Have fun!

Dimitris Staikos

Comments

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[dromma]

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[Computer repair toronto]

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[Ernesto Reyes]

This article is very useful for everyone of us. Sometimes the problem is not that big, the only thing we need is to think and use our common sense. And after that, we are going to fix a problem on our own.