Last night writing some HTML code I had to use one of those special characters  ….

Couldn’t find it straight away and ended up making a page with the iso8859-1 or Latin-1 Character set

While writing my previous blogentry I held my clumsy fingers a bit to long on the shift key. You now what happens next ….

Sticky keys pop-up and before you know it you have locked your shift key in the pressed down state. Bugger. Next thing is how to get it out of this state.

What follows is a good example of  user obfuscation. You open up the Accesability dialog and try to gain control over your keyboard. Checkboxes all over the place. Oh well it’s late and will skip the torture story. I Googled for a solution and found it at TweakXP.com. 

By Default a feature called Sticky Keys will be enabled on your PC. To disable this feature follow these steps:

1. Press SHIFT 5 times consecutively. The StickyKeys box will pop up.

2. Click Settings. Accessibility Options pops up.

3. On the "Keyboard" tab click the "Settings" button in the "StickyKeys" section.

4. Uncheck the items in this window and click OK.

5. Click Apply and OK on Accessibility Options.

The solution was to uncheck all items! Duh!

But I’m still wondering, this is an accesability option that keeps the shift key in a “pressed” state. The only thing to do to get it in this tate is to press it 5 times. This just doen’t make sense to me.

You press Ctrl-Shift-Escape to display the Task Manager and browse through all your tasks to see what’s slowing down your machine. Then there is this “svchost.exe” that shows up several times. Sometimes running the tasks as SYSTEM, NETWORK SERVICE or LOCAL SERVICE.

To find out what is running behind the svchost you can use the commandline tool “tasklist”.

Open a command prompt.

Type “tasklist /svc”, hit [Enter] and behold you can actually see what is running behind the svchost.exe.