ALT/PrtScn no longer working

[Laurel]

NOTE - If this is not the right newsgroup for this question, could someone
re-direct me?


I use ALT/PrtScn frequently to capture a bitmap of the current window, but
it is no longer working. Plain old PrtScn still captures a bitmap of the
full screen. The symptom is that after I press ALT/PrtScn and then ctrl/V,
either nothing is pasted, or the last text or whatever that I "cut" is
pasted.

I recently upgraded to Windows XP, and have been fine tuning settings. I
probably did something...

The ALT key still works physcially. For instance, pressing ALT will cause
underlines to appear under the short cut letters in menus of certain
applications.

I hope someone can help here. I work remotely and really rely on being able
to send bitmaps of error windows, and such.... without sending the whole
screen.

TIA
Laurel

 

[Laurel]

Well, for anyone who is interested, here's how it was resolved. After Dell
laptop support spent over an hour running diagnostics on drivers and the
keyboard, and comparing my OS files with those on the distribution disk,
and... and.... they said it was software. The software folks said I'd have
to talk to "Advanced Tech Support." There I got the solution in 10 minutes.
It consisted of going to My Computer/Manage/Device Manager/Keyboards, and
choosing Uninstall for both the keyboards there (my laptop and the external
keyboard), and then rebooting to allow Windows to find re-install the
drivers itself. That did it.

BTW - To increase the weirdness, I discovered after posting this question
that when I was not using the external keyboard NEITHER ALT/print screen NOR
Print Screen worked. Print Screen always worked with the external keyboard.