Extreme Slowness when Keyboard Shortcuts are Invoked

britechguy

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As Daffy Duck once said (I think), "I've had all I can stand, I can stand no more!!"

Since I work with folks with who are visually impaired or blind, I am a lot more keyboard shortcut centric than most Windows users have been for decades. I really like a lot of them even for myself, as getting certain things done is so much faster without having to point and click.

For a long time now, and across programs, when I invoke any ribbon, in any program, there is an insane delay between when I hit ALT+{Letter} to invoke it, to when focus goes to it and all of the "next step" shortcut characters are shown in that ribbon for the controls. For example, if I hit ALT+F in File Explorer, it just takes forever for the File Tab to come up. In addition, very often I get a "black square" for the whole ribbon, then the ribbon appears, then I get a series of black squares for all the "next step" key sequences before they are painted in.

The fact that this crosses programs, and occurs in Windows functions like File Explorer, as well as in application programs, makes me think that this is a "Windows level" issue, but I'll be darned if I'm able to figure out what it is, and I've been trying for quite a while.

By contrast, on all other machines I do this on, the response is virtually instant, including on the "hardware twin" of my laptop that's my partner's.

Any ideas for what to try will be much appreciated.
 
On my desktop, there is about a half second delay before the overlays appear after simply pressing alt. Every overlay activation beyond that is doing exactly the same delay too... AND it's consistent on my desktop, laptop, and my repair bench.

Is the delay you're referring to longer than that?
 
@Computer Bloke

Thanks, but this behavior is completely independent of any screen reader being in use or not.

In a quick test right now, no screen reader in use, and making sure that MS-Word was not in "not responding" mode, hitting ALT+H to trigger focus on the Home ribbon took 10 seconds before the first "small black square" that will eventually be filled in by the shortcut characters appeared. It took approximately 1 second per black square, and I stopped watching after that. Usually all the black squares appear then, voila, all of them fill in at once.

On most computers, I hit ALT+H (or whatever) and all the squares are almost instantly present and filled in. There's none of this "one by one" appearance behavior. And the whole affair takes no longer, at max, than about half a second, as @Sky-Knight has described. This is definitely something idiosyncratic to my machine, and I'm in no humor to solve it with a "nuke and pave."

It is, to put it mildly, annoying.
 
Haven't tried testing in Safe Mode, and that would be a good first step.

Then I could go through the clean boot process if things were fine in Safe Mode.

I do not think the article you referenced is what's at play.
 
If so have you done a full shutdown? As in shutdown and pull the power cord, desktop, or battery, laptop for 30 minutes or so. Then power up. If it's a laptop first without the battery. While rare I've seen hybrid sleep/hibernation cause some really bizarre problems, like power on but nothing happens.
 
@Markverhyden

Nope, I haven't done that, but I could overnight tonight. I may be on to something anyway (more below).

@Computer Bloke

FYI, and I had forgotten this, too, you can't fire up MS-Word in Safe Mode so the sort of testing I would need to do can't be done in Safe Mode.

I found something in both old Control Panel, and Windows 10 Startup Settings that's called PrintDisp:


PrintDisp_in_Startup.jpg

It seems to be associated with a virtual PDF printer (FlexiPDF) that I believe I may have installed myself, but that's unclear. What's interesting is that removing that virtual printer doesn't get rid of it. Opening Programs and Features reveals nothing related to removing this thing. Even Revo Uninstaller doesn't seem to see it.

Disabling it appears to have cured my issue, though that declaration may be premature, only more time will tell, but I still would love to know how to get rid of this thing!
 
It's part of ALL2PDF, if that helps.

Appreciated, but it doesn't, as that can't be found for removal, either. It's very, very strange, and I don't just want to nuke this out of the Sys32 folder when there is a startup entry for it. I suspect that would trigger issues of its own, but I cannot find any graceful way to uninstall it, nor to force uninstall it with Revo.
 
The graceful way of handling this is probably to install ALL2PDF and then uninstall it, but if blocking it from running at startup works for you then I'd be tempted to leave it at that.

The less graceful way is to rename the binary and see what breaks. That's what I'd do if I were bored...
 
That's what I'd do if I were bored...

Right now I'm also the executor for the estate of a dear friend who passed away on January 13th, and she left her house to someone who has asked that we have it cleared out in 90 days (and she and her husband were both pack rats). It'll be a while before any sort of boredom has any chance to enter my life again!
 
Looks like all2pdf is the back end for printdisp (print display) which, I'd guess, allows PDF's to be displayed or convert anything to PDF. But I thought the native PDF converter is some print driver beginning with Microsoft. At least what I remember from messing around with QB invoice emailing issues. Maybe it was installed by another app that has PDF management capabilities. At any rate disabling is the nickle solution to the dime problem. I'm sure something will complain if it needs that.

 
What about your TrayStatus app listed on your Startup snapshot? I assume that's for capslock/numlock status and runs in the system tray, it will be capturing keystrokes and might be playing up. Try disabling that from startup and rebooting.
 
What about your TrayStatus app listed on your Startup snapshot? I assume that's for capslock/numlock status and runs in the system tray, it will be capturing keystrokes and might be playing up. Try disabling that from startup and rebooting.

I use TrayStatus on multiple machines, and only this one has problems. It is configured for NumLock (since I have no NumLock indicator light) and to give an icon for disk I/O. It should not be capturing keystrokes, as configured, but looking at states with regard to NumLock.

It's running right now, and I still have not hit the extreme slowdown since my last restart. If this holds for a couple of days I think I've found my culprit. Why that program should have anything to do with this remains a complete mystery.
 
I think I would direct some attention to the video system.

That was my gut reaction initially as well, particularly with the "black square" symptom.

That being said, things are still behaving normally as of a few minutes ago with no system restart or any other changes than I reported previously. And this issue had been long term, it just kept being pushed down to the bottom of my priority list, since the behavior was isolated to when keyboard shortcuts were being used. Point and click was not affected.
 
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