Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I love my MS Natural Multimedia Keyboard, I’ve used them for years, I even bought my own that I use at work.

I’ve had my keyboard at home for probably 4 years now and it was starting to get really nasty; there was lots of dirt and grime on/in the keyboard. I had half-assed tried to clean it in the past by just rubbing the grime off, but I decided recently to do it right. I unplugged the keyboard and used an alcohol swap to wipe the whole thing down and got it really clean, it was great.

I left it to dry for a couple days and used a backup keyboard in the meantime. After a few days I plugged it back in, on a day that I was working from home.

I am a big fan of Yahoo Music Jukebox, and I have it on when I’m working, especially if I’m at home. As I was working and listening to music, the volume would get muted off and on at random intervals.

After awhile this got really annoying and I started to pay attention to what was going on. Eventually I figured out that my left shift key was functioning exactly as the Mute key on my multimedia keyboard. It would capitalize my letters, and toggle the volume mute. Here are the different search terms I tried in google to find someone who had run into this before:

• windows left shift key mute
• windows shift mute
• vista left shift key mute
• vista shift mute
• left shift mute
• shift mute
• vista left shift
• windows left shift
• left shift key mute
• left shift key mutes speakers
• shift key mute
• shift key mutes speakers
• shift mute
• shift mutes speakers
• shift mute volume
• shift  = mute

It seems that NOBODY has had this happen to them before. I gave up and plugged in the backup keyboard, but I was annoyed. I had simply wanted to clean my goddamn keyboard, is that so wrong??

I tried fixing this issue again yesterday. I tried several key remappers but nothing was working, and not only that, but when you remap keys you need to reboot your machine for it to take effect so I was rebooting my machine a bunch too.

I finally found a solution that fixed my problem. I used SharpKeys to disable my multimedia Mute key, as well as remap the left shift key to the right shift key. I suspect that simply disabling the Mute key would have worked, but I didn’t want to tempt fate again, so I’ve left it as is, I never use the Mute key anyways, so I don’t care.

I also tried using KeyTweak which has the same ability to disable/enable keys and remap keys, but I never tried disabling Mute with KeyTweak, but I would guess that it works the same as SharpKeys.

Anyways, there you have it, if your left shift key suddenly starts muting your speakers, here’s your solution.