Bad keystroke combination?

[Opinicus]

Is there any combination of keystrokes that could cause someone's keyboard
AND mouse to lock up in Word? This has happened three times to my wife
recently and it's driving her (and consequently me) crazy. She has *no*
programs running in the background since she only uses her computer to work
on her novel.

A hard reset is the only way to regain control of the system.

 

[Bob I]

You say "novel", if it is very large document, and the key stroke is
doing some thing like repaginate it could take a long time. Hard to
guess what your key combo is. Also possible she's forcing a save or many
other possible actions. Is the background Autorecover turned on? There
is no "keystroke combination" intended to cause Word to lock up, but the
effect can be caused by shortcut keys and the right workload. If being
patient, does control return?

 

[Opinicus]

You say "novel", if it is very large document, and the key stroke is doing
some thing like repaginate it could take a long time. Hard to guess what
your key combo is. Also possible she's forcing a save or many other
possible actions. Is the background Autorecover turned on? There is no
"keystroke combination" intended to cause Word to lock up, but the effect
can be caused by shortcut keys and the right workload. If being patient,
does control return?

We broke the complete file up into manageable sections just to avoid the
repagination problem and for the last three nights she's been working on a
newly opened chunk so it can't be the file size. Background autorecover is
turned on. (Thank goodness.) Being patient doesn't seem to return control:
at least six hours passed last night and the keyboard and mouse were still
locked up.

The fact that the keyboard AND the mouse lock up puzzles me and makes me
think it's not a software problem--or at least not related to Word. Equally
puzzling however is that I can't get the system to lock up no matter what I
do, which made me think that she might be hitting some weird combination of
keystrokes. Thanks for confirming that's not possible.

Since this just started three days ago I tried a system restore rollback to
the beginning of the month this morning. Let's see if that makes a
difference.

 

[Bob I]

Not getting any hourglass? But the PC is unresponsive? Perhaps hardware
lockup due to heat?

 

[Keme]

Is there any combination of keystrokes that could cause someone's keyboard
AND mouse to lock up in Word? This has happened three times to my wife
recently and it's driving her (and consequently me) crazy. She has *no*
programs running in the background since she only uses her computer to work
on her novel.

A hard reset is the only way to regain control of the system.

Portable computer? Some have a security "lock" option available on an
"Fn+x" key combination (indicated by a key icon on the key in question,
got it?). To unlock, you must either press the "Fn+x" combination once
more, or (if set in BIOS) key in the user or setup password.