On my wife’s DP 800, 10.4.11

Seemingly, all at once, a Shift+G always yielded a dialog box prompting for a computer-to-computer set up. I should have copied the exact wording, but it was something like that. No way could I type an uppercase G.

That weirdness occurred in Word, TextEdit, Mail, everyplace.

I checked all keyboard settings and such to see if somehow a new shortcut got created. Nothing there. No SW installed in the past 2 weeks. Humm.

I then Safe Booted and the problem disappeared.

So I presume some User setting became corrupted. Not wanting to muck about looking for the guilty plist or whatever, I merely reverted her machine to a day old backup. Had that been my computer, I would have worked the issue for several hours before posting. But my Empress is not interested in analyses: “Return all system to full operation within 5 minutes of calling TechSupport”. Simple she says…

But I remain curious about what might have happened.

Have you any guesses?

Corrupt font(s)?

Jon,

It was afraid it might be something like that. I have no special font tools/applications, so I know of no easy way to identify which corrupt font may at play. Still, I remain open to suggestions.

Always, I appreciate your time.

Font Book (in /Applications) has some tools for this in case you're not familiar with it. You can select all fonts in the FB window and then go to File>Validate Font. It takes a few minutes but it will find whatever problems it thinks you have. You can then disable or delete problem fonts.

Another tack is to disable duplicate fonts because they can cause conflicts. FB shows the duplicates via a dot at the right of the font. You can select a particular font and then go to Edit>Resolve Duplicates to disable duplicates for that particular font, or you can select all fonts and then go to Edit>Resolve Duplicates to do the same for all of them. You can always re-enable them if you so choose.

Thanks Jon, I'll give it a go.

After I have resolved all duplicates, can I safely presume any such future occurrences are the product of some other gremlin?

Possibly, but bear in mind that we don't know if your original problem was due to font issues. I suggested fonts as a logical guess because starting up in Safe Mode disables all fonts except those necessary for running the system. Probably, you'll never know the cause.

A safe boot also flushes the font caches which could have also been the cause of the problem.

Thanks for the reminder. Safe Boot also runs fsck so that could have cured the problem as well. As I said, we'll never know.