Mouse pointer moving on arrow keys pressed

52

5

I'm encountering a strange problem on my W10 computer, for a few days my arrow keys have been "driving" my mouse pointer. Pressing the left arrow key will move the pointer a few pixels left, etc.

The first thing that came to my mind was "oh well, I must have enabled Mouse Keys inadvertently". But Mouse Keys use the numpad and even then, it's not enabled. Rebooting doesn't help, but I've noticed it doesn't happen if the current window is ran as another user (Administrator) or if it's the Task Manager, which suggests the event filter that's catching the key press events is only active on my UID.

I've tried killing various processes but I'm running out of ideas. I'm fairly sure it's a dumb issue but it's been driving me nuts.

zdimension

Posted 2019-08-03T14:39:57.570

Reputation: 2 523

1Does it happen when booting in Safe mode? – harrymc – 2019-08-03T14:43:38.990

Answers

139

Tried killing all running processes on my PC till the problem went away and I can now say for sure the culprit was...

Microsoft Paint

(classic Win32 one)

Apparently it's got a feature that allows moving the mouse pointer using arrow keys, and for some reason sometimes it doesn't stop listening when the window loses focus, so Paint was running in the background since I often use it and it was still doing its job of moving the mouse.

zdimension

Posted 2019-08-03T14:39:57.570

Reputation: 2 523

1Please mark your answer as best answer. Good job finding the culprit. – DrZoo – 2019-08-04T09:02:35.880

1I'll do after two days, the button is not enabled yet – zdimension – 2019-08-04T11:21:04.580

Thank you so much, I've searched for this quite a while. Never did i expect paint to be the culprit. (I Replaced mspaint.exe with a mspaint from a windows10 1806 version and it doesn't do this behavior anymore.) According to: https://winaero.com/blog/microsoft-is-updating-paint-with-new-accessibility-features/ Its a new feature in 1903

– Kage – 2019-08-30T12:42:46.410

11I'm glad this website exists! I didn't think I'd find the answer this quick. – Hamid Heydarian – 2019-09-03T22:11:59.127

Thank you so much – Sky – 2019-09-06T08:50:59.473

5Thank you soooooo much, that answers the question why mouse cursor only moves on some strange small square. And seems it occurs only when you have several MSPaint running and wake up your laptop from sleep several times. – Leo Li – 2019-09-09T03:14:40.913

3(In my case) I guess Paint was open before my crash. After the crash, when windows recovered what it could of my session, this was suddenly happening. Closing Paint worked for me too. Thanks! – Regular Joe – 2019-09-13T16:15:52.120

1I thought I was going insane. Thank you. – Warren P – 2019-11-08T15:49:49.567

1It was paint after all .... – Jelly – 2019-11-11T02:24:58.817

probably it can have something to do with remote desktop – or hor – 2019-11-18T05:39:54.633

Thank you. Just happened to me today and I was freaked out. I closed paint and it stopped. – David Molano – 2020-01-10T22:19:38.727

1Yup! Just had the same issue, amazing you found out, thanks for sharing! – Celius Stingher – 2020-02-15T21:59:00.183

Man! This was it :) – mlvljr – 2020-02-17T11:08:13.923

holy f#$!, nice looking out! Never would've guessed it was this one! – icy – 2020-02-27T21:18:44.257