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I'm using Kinesis Advantage with my macbook pro retina, mid-2012, OSX Mavericks -- though this has been happening with previous OSX versions too. Every once in a while, my Alt key (mapped to the option key) will magically register a press and stay pressed. I don't have sticky keys on. It doesn't even seem like I need to do anything to my keyboard for this to happen. It's incredibly annoying as if I subsequently press Cmd-W in Chrome, it closes all tabs as Alt-Cmd-W does exactly that and there seems no way to change that.

Has anyone experience anything like this? Is there a solution to this?

Edit: This also happens sometimes with the SHIFT key.

Mokubai
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Opt
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  • Have you tried to clean the keyboard contacts? – jimtut Jul 23 '14 at 19:30
  • Hm I haven't but this is a problem that's happened to me with several different Kinesis keyboards. I don't recall though if this was happening when they were new. Now that I think about it, this also happens sometimes with the SHIFT key. It doesn't make sense though -- why it would be a problem with just those two keys and none others. – Opt Jul 24 '14 at 04:33

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I've seen this problem before as well, although only with the shift key and not with any other modifier keys. On page 32 of the user manual, Kinesis seems to blame it on the operating system, saying that "occasionally a PC will experience a stuck modifier when the release of a modifier key is missed by the system." I have no memory of ever having experienced this on any other keyboard, though, so there must be something going on with the way the Advantage is set up. At any rate, tapping the key once has always solved the problem for me, but it sounds like you already know that and this isn't really a solution to it happening in the first place. (Hopefully it helps to explain what's going on, though?)

I will say that, at least for me, the problem seems to come and go; sometimes I've seen it happen several times in a week, but other times I can go several months without noticing it, so in total it's not particularly annoying for me. To respond to what Opt suggested, I definitely noticed the issue within the first day of owning mine, so it's probably not the contacts being dirty (though cleaning it certainly couldn't hurt).

Soren Bjornstad
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Older Kinesis keyboards have a hardware bug that causes this. I have one too, the "Advantage MPC/USB". Newer Kinesis (eg. Advantage2) keyboards have the bug fix.

Donn Lee
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Program+[modifier]+f6 enables / disables on leopard sticky key for that modifier.

Try it a few times, when I find it gets accidentally turned on, the first P+[m]+f6 "Enables" it, but then doing it again successfully disables it.

http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/Public/kinesisCheatSheet.html

Jay Bobzin
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