Strangest Bug Ever

I recently came across an extremely odd bug in Visual Studio 2003, which I've since learned is known as the Haunted Keyboard bug. I was editing some code, and suddenly a few of my keys stopped responding. Pressing enter, tab, or the arrow keys did nothing, while the normal letter keys worked normally. Very strange. I actually physically checked the keyboard to see if something was jamming or sticking to the keys, before opening Notepad and verifying that they worked fine there.

The explanation is that this bug allows one of the docked Visual Studio windows, such as the Toolbox, to grab focus for command keystrokes, but not others. The interesting thing is that for different versions of VS there are different fixes - in one case you can simply select the Toolbox and then set focus back to the code editor, and in another you need to reset all settings. Also you may need to use a fixed-pitch font, for some reason. Interestingly I could not find any mention of this happening in VS2003, where I was getting it, but only in VS2005. There were also claims that this issue was resolved for the release version of VS2005, but also postings of users still experiencing it there.

In any case, I was glad to find that this was a known issue. It was one of the few times where I've wondered if I was literally hallucinating the behaviour I was seeing. I'm happy I wasn't, partly because I don't particularly want to hallucinate, and partly because Oh noes my enter key doesn't work! is a pretty lame hallucination, even for me :).