I noticed back in August (when I got StarCraft 2) that the key combinations Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 didn't work. I thought this was weird because Ctrl+3 and all the other combinations worked fine (including Shift+1, and etc), so I didn't think much of it; I just shrugged it off as a SC2 bug.
Now, 4 months later, I decided to play a completely unrelated game (Dawn of War 2) and noticed the same thing: those two specific key combinations don't work. To make sure I wasn't going insane, I tried it in Chrome and a couple other applications, and alas, it didn't work.
I remember playing strategy games over the summer before StarCraft 2 and it worked fine. Any idea as to what went wrong?
Things I've tried
- ActiveHotkeys says the key combination is not a global hotkey.
- Tried another keyboard--still didn't work.
- The key combinations worked in a virtual machine (tried with both Windows and Ubuntu as guests).
- Using Ctrl+1 as a hotkey to an AutoHotKey script worked.
- Using Ctrl+1 as the output of an AutoHotKey script didn't work.
- I terminated all non-essential processes, and the keys still didn't work.
- In Safe Mode, the key combinations didn't work.
I'm running out of ideas
What else could be going on? Could a program have set some kind of keyboard hook and just never released it? Is there a way for me to see the path that the input takes through the system, to perhaps see where it stops? I'm a programmer, so I'd be fine with writing some code to help me figure this out.
44 Answers
You could try and use Signo: it can tell you which application uses a certain hotkey, though not always; and if Activehotkeys doesn't see a hook, then I don't expect Signo to either - but who knows.
For more testing, you could download VirtualBox, make a virtual machine (that is easy), install Windows on this virtual machine, and test the hotkeys there. If they still don't work, then it is probably some weird hardware thing.
7In my case this was caused by NVidia Geforce experience. It's not listed anywhere in the program under it's keyboard shortcuts - but uninstalling Geforce experience gave me my CRTL+1-3 keys back..
Great job Nvidia..
3The Ctrl + 1 until 0 won't work if Windows is using them for changing keyboard layouts (English, Japanese, Norwegian and so on).
Go into the Control Panel (viewed by Category) » Clock, Language and Region » Change Keyboards or other Input Methods » Keyboards and Languages tab; Change Keyboards » Advanced Key Settings » Change Key Sequence for Ctrl + 1 until 0, to Shift + Ctrl + 1 until 0 or similar, depending on what you use.
I uninstalled Geforce Experience v3.2.2.44 and it instantly fixed everything.
