Catastrophe

A little context: i work in Visual Studio 2022 and develop enterprise software, for use on Windows PCs, for a major organisation.

One of our solutions is a mix of VB and C# projects and recently we thought we'd try to add a new USB HID (Human Interaction Device), in this case a fingerprint scanner. It's still in dev and isn't urgent, so we have time to tinker etc.

The supplied DLL didn't like working with the startup project, so I decided to convert the VB project into C#. The conversion was something we had been discussing for some time, so now seemed like a good time to start the process. We'd just deployed a new build, so we have time to work on this part of things.

I used a VS extension to do the conversion and, overall, it worked great. There are some things that have to be manually tweaked however, that was to be expected as some third party packages didn't like being converted. A simple fix.

After I closed VS, I noticed some odd behaviour in my file explorer: when I clicked on a folder, and then another folder, instead of the focus moving to the second folder, it selected both. If I clicked a third, it added it to the selection.

Obviously, something was wrong. I immediately uninstalled the extension and everything was fine again. I had to do more conversions, so I reinstalled the extension, did what I needed to do, uninstalled and shut down my laptop.

Then today, when I started up my laptop, all those problems were back. It was a nightmare and I was in a complete panic.

I tried using restore points, twice. They didn't work.

I even used the "reset" feature to reinstall Windows. Nothing.

I was about to give up when (after some intense prayers as a last resort), I ran my fingers over the keyboard several times, thinking that perhaps something might be lodged between a key somewhere, causing all the chaos.

Success! After the rubbing the keys, once I restarted the laptop, everything was back in perfect working order.

To this day, I don't know what the cause was. Nothing came up when I opened Word, so it wasn't a standard character key. The mouse was especially weird: if I double clicked a folder it would open properties. Also, there was nothing online that seemed relevant. I don't know if it really was the extension or if it was something else. The keys felt perfectly fine when I was running my hands allover them. Nothing fell out. It's a mystery.

I'm feeling exhausted yet, overall I'm finally at peace.