I’m writing this for anyone else who has had a similar problem in Kaspersky where it renders your keyboard useless.
I downloaded the trial version of Kaspersky’s Pure program to try to get rid of some pesky viruses that have been lingering on this computer for ages. I had downloaded SpyBot, MalwareBytes, and neither picked up the problem. The problem was an annoying invasion of internet browsers (I think it’s called Rootkit), that redirects searches and sometimes randomly pops up a new window or two. I read about Kaspersky and heard about it before, so I thought I’d give it a try. Seeing as it was trial software, that makes sense.
First thing Kaspersky finds and asks my permission to confiscate, I agree. I figure, it’s a program designed to do this; I’ll trust its instincts (/code). After, it tells me it’s found 2 viruses, and has cleaned them up. Great, I thought. Then I found that one thing I agreed to at the beginning, and saw there were options at the top, suggesting deleting etc. so I did. Then I realized I couldn’t type anything. The keyboard was useless. Going back to Kaspersky, I realized I now had no access to the one thing I deleted. Frig.
I fiddled around with Control Panel, deleting my keyboards, restarting, unplugging and plugging back in, nothing was working.
I go online using my laptop (thank goodness I had it here), searching for Kaspersky problems with keyboards, and found only a similar problem with a mouse. Well, not quite transferable.
I waited for about 45 minutes for an online Kaspersky person to do a live chat. He didn’t know what was going on, asked me to press F8 continuously after a restart (nothing happened). Then I tried pressing the F12 that it said to press to get into setup, nothing. He asked me to plug in another keyboard, and it worked fine.
The guy tried to tell me it was a coincidence, and that my keyboard must have broken at just that time. I had been fiddling around while chatting with him. Needless to say, I politely told him that before using Kaspersky, my keyboard had been just fine and that I had expected the program to know the difference between a threat and a keyboard. I told him that in fact, I plugged it into my laptop and was now typing to him using it, so clearly Kaspersky had done something to prevent it from being recognized.
Well, I’ll never know what it did, because I decided to plug in the old keyboard again after the other one worked fine, and it worked again.
All I can say is, Kaspersky got rid of my viruses (I think), but if it can’t tell the difference between a virus and an intentionally-connected device, I think I’ll pass on re-installing it.
Clio44's Blog 