Text fields go crazy?

I first experienced this problem yesterday.

I was running firefox for some time, and was about to type in a new address, but upon clicking on the address bar, the cursor went flickering across the whole address, as if someone were pressing the left or right arrow rapidly.

Opening up the start menu, the same thing happens with the Search box. The red sleep button, lock button and the arrow were also doing some sort of dance that involves them blinking one by one really fast, which looked quite nice until I realized that I couldn't restart my computer because clicking on the arrow button produced a menu constantly being scrolled up and down (like someone pressing the up button non-stop).

I ended up doing alt-ctrl-del and restarting from that screen, and everything worked fine again.

The same thing happened today. Has anyone experienced this problem?

 

No. That's disturbing. Try a System Restore. For future reference, you can do an Alt+F4 from the Desktop to Restart.

 

I did not install/ change anything the past few days, so would System Restore actually help?

 

Yes, as a program which you don't know about could've done that.

 

It could be a program/virus/piece of spyware, but it could also be that the actual keyboard itself is acting up. Try removing the battery, then pressing the power button to make sure that all the charge inside the machine is removed. Then re-seat the battery and turn the machine on to see if that fixed it. I know the old Pavilion dv5000 and dv8000 had all kinds of weird issues with their keyboards.

Another thing that you might want to try is running the machine in safe mode to see if that strange behavior still occurs. Also run spyware scanners (such as Spybot: S&D) to see if you can find anything there that might be causing the issue.

 

I have an external keyboard set up. I'm going to try disconnecting that keyboard and do a system restore tomorrow.

Strangely enough, the cursor jumping all over the text field thing does not happen all the time which I suspect it would if there really is something wrong with the keyboard or if there's a virus. It just comes right out of the blue, and both times I had just brought the computer out of hibernation maybe an hour ago, but I've not yet heard of anyone having this problem after hibernation.