Hi guys, heres the story. My boss has a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo on a Dell computer running Windows 2k professional. She also has an obsession with drinking tea allll day long. So yesterday morning she spills a huge, novelty size cup of tea onto her keyboard. The keyboard is soaked and her admin assistant drys the keyboard off (not really), waits a few minutes and tells my boss that they keyboard works after her thorough testing. After using the recently soaked keyboard for a few minutes, my boss starts realizing that the keys are all mixed up. She was in the middle of .pdf'ing a document and whatever she was doing accidentally made the computer restart.

This is where things take a turn for the worse. The mouse doesn't work, the keyboard doesn't respond, nothin. Note I've come into this whole situation quite late, her administrative assistant was dealing with this yesterday. Its a really long story but basically, over the next 7 hours, she goes through about 4 or 5 different mouse/keyboard combinations: Logitech MX5000 (which she realized was only for Windows XP after connecting and trying to install it), the original mouse, Logitech MX3000, LX300?, and a generic mouse/keyboard setup. Everytime she would try a different combination, it would get as far as the Login screen. At that point, it wouldn't proceed further because neither mouse or keyboard would work. When she tried the original, the mouse worked and she was able to get into Windows and everything was just fine. I guess this was when she tried installing drivers for one of the other keyboards and she was unable to for some reason. This part might have happened a couple times.

God what a pita. Anyhow, basically she calls me in this morning and says, "nothing works, the ports must be fried." I go in there, disconnect everything except for a generic keyboard and mouse. Turn on the computer and F2 to get into setup. The keyboard responds and I can get into setup. Next, while its loading Windows I hit F8 to try to get into Safe Mode and that works. So it starts up in safe mode and gets to the login screen but no further. All you can do is shut down and turn the computer back on again. This is where we are at right now. Basically, the computer is not recognizing any keyboard or mouse. There is no way to get past the login screen. I don't think the ports are fried*, but I do think she tried installing so many different types of Logitech keyboards and mice as well as a microsoft usb mouse, that the computer is just totally confused at this point. Nothing is responding.

Please help. My boss is flippin out and I pretty much have no clue how to proceed. Logitech apparantly told whatserface that they couldn't help her if she can't get past the login screen.

* The old Logitech system she was using (with the teasoaked keyboard) had a rechargable base for the mouse. The way it connected was that the base has a USB connnection that goes to the computer -- however, the part that goes into the back of the PC is a little fatter cause it is also where the power plugs in. The mouse/base were never touched by the tea though so I dunno how this coulda fried anything.

I know this is really ridiuclous and convoluted but any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

By generic do you mean USB or PS2? If it's running win2k I would assume it's got PS2 ports?

If you can move around in the bios, you've certainly got a windows driver problem. I don't have any idea how you'd go about fixing that.

Matthew

PS2 is what I meant. I can definitely move around the bios. But no keyboard/mouse works once you load Windows. Thats what I figured, driver problems. So I guess the question is, how can I delete all mouse driver files without being able to get into the system to uninstall anything?

Does safe mode with command promt work?

Or you can take the hard drive out of the machine and work from there. [Mac Evangelist Mode]If this were a mac (and you were having this problem) you could just boot it in target disk mode instead of ripping out the hard drive.[/Mac Evangelist Mode]

Of course, you still need to figure out what files to delete or replace.

Matthew

Okay, update. I connected a PS2 keyboard and a PS2 mouse. On the Microsoft knowledge database, I read something about holding shift while Win 2k is starting to try to get past the login screen or something to that effect. I thought what the hell, i"ll try it. This did something totally unexpected. I held shift while booting up and the computer gave a message at startup about there being a keyboard error, then the message went away and Windows continuted to load. This time, the mouse actually works (PS2 mouse didn't work but PS2 mouse with one of those USB adaptors did). So know I'm in Windows, and I'm wondering what I should do to start from scratch regarding keyboards/mice. Just nuke everything Logitech related?

Thanks for your replies.

Hmmm. I'd uninstall the software that's showing up as uninstallable, then I'd go into the hardware manager and delete any mice or keyboards. That may not be enough, but at least it's a start. Also, try plugging in a USB keyboard once the computer's running, to see if it can detect it properly if it's not going through the bios or anything.

Matthew

Thanks for the help Matthew. I did just that and uninstalled anything I could find mouse/keyboard related. Things seem to be working okay now with the generic stuff. Funny thing, the holding shift key was the key. I have no idea how that made things work but it did.

Cool, glad to hear it's working. I don't think I've ever heard of windows not being able to use any keyboards before this. I guess there's a first time for everything.

Matthew

Not much I can help with here, but I know you can get the Logitech MX5000 to work in Win2k. I have the same keyboard/mouse and I'm using Win2k. If you go the the Logitech site and check under MX5000, it only lists driver/software for XP/XP64, but if you go to MX1000 mouse, you'll find software also for Win2k. But it will not work with KVM switches (at least I haven't found any it will work with).

Stig

Good point.