as i see things, youve reinstalled XP and this has fixed the keyboard problem? yes? so it was a driver issue in windows? Now your off on one about ram corruption? I mean jesus you might say im being black and white but your a bit of a damn rainbow.
Facts:
You rebooted and keyboard stopped responding.
You buggered about in the registry and made things worse.
You then performed a full reinstall and all is well.
Summary:
1 dont mess in the registry first do it last.
2 You should have been more patient and got hold of some usb peripherals to be safe
3 you should have updated the keyboard drivers from those on the XP CD by forcing the install.
Simple fact is, no offence intended m8 but i fix PC's for a living, youve gone 3 times around the block to find next door, that is slow down and think about things harder, i doubt the only solution was to reinstall XP although it was the most easy.
You missed fact 4.
4 Don't attempt to repair a broken install of XP, when drivers are corrupted. This only leads to booting up into XP installation rather than XP itself, when the driver crashes setup. Thus making twice as much work for myself, because I had to install XP twice.
The fact is, I tinkered about with an already buggered registry - after searching on Google, it seemed like last minute alternative. I could plug my mouse into the USB port, and (if I wanted to) copy my files across.
Had I for one minute suspected that removing such registry entries would bugger up all PS/2 port activity, I would have backed up - making less work for myself. But due to a suggestion in this thread, I chose to attempt to repair the install - when I think about it, I'm not sure if got me anywhere really.
At the end of the day, I should have copied my files when I had the chance. I chose the easy router, and seeing if I could produce a make shift OS. But when I think about it, in the time used to repair/install XP temporarily, I could have copied my files over.
The fact I was thinking so far into it, is because that's my nature. I know one pair of my memory sticks are running just outside their designed speeds (of 3500) at 230 FSB. I suspect this is what's causing me grief, corrupting my registry.
Before I got my second pair of RAM sticks (Corsair 4400), I was getting the odd crash. But nothing severe really happened - I got the odd application crash, nothing much more. When I introduced the new pair of RAM sticks into the system, things suddenly turn a little iffy - hence why I think they may have corrupted the registry. Maybe they don't like the slower 3500 sticks, who knows?
I think I'll make a new thread in Memory soon, anyway.
Thanks for any help you gave me, Ultra. I don't see why tried to criticise me from your first post in this thread, though. Maybe you've seen your backside?
