[albyrw]

Hi all,

Problem with my aluminum wired USB keyboard, would be grateful for a little help. A few days ago the six navigation keys in between the letters and the numeric keypad just stopped working - fn, home, pg up, delete, end and pg down. Not sure why, but what I do know about the problem is that I've already reset the OS X keyboard shortcuts in system prefs and that didn't help. Also, it's a software problem somewhere in my user account because they work just fine logged in with my gf's account. Is there a prefs file or something I can delete to return the keyboard mappings to default? Or a file that might be corrupted that I can retrieve from Time Machine? It's driving me nuts!

Thanks!
alby

[Eug]

Do you have another Mac you can boot from for testing?

I had this same problem with an old Mac keyboard I had. It turned out to be an OS/driver/software issue somehow, cuz another install of OS X worked fine.

[Simon]

You can find out which pref file it is rather quickly.

1) Move the first half of your pref files to another location (for example ~/Desktop/tmp/)
2) Log out and log back in
3) If the problem has vanished, you know the bad pref was among those files you sorted out
4) Move half of the previously sorted out pref files back to your pref folder and repeat steps 2-4

[albyrw]

Simon, brilliant strategy, thanks so much for this idea, so simple. I eventually found out it was quicksilver at fault - I'd accidentally set delete as one of the triggers, must have done it accidentally while tooling around in the QS prefs. Problem fixed now. Thanks again!
alby

[Simon]

Glad it worked out for you.