strange issue on my sons laptop

[matrass]

Just fixed my sons laptop last week before he went back to school. the hard drive was going so I had a known good spare to replace it with. reloaded Vista and a couple of other programs an all is good. he called me today to say that he can not open any files on his desktop, they just ask do you want to delete , yes or no. he will hit no a few times and the option will go away.try and right click a program and it and a it seems to be the same thing asking if he wants to delete shortcut. wish I had the pc in front of me to check it out as this is a weird one. had him check and hot keys seems to be still disabled. thinking maybe keyboard issue? any thoughts would be appreciated. first question I asked was did you download or install any new programs and he said no.

 

[ChrisW]

I wonder if using an external keyboard and mouse would yield different results although I've never really heard of a single right-click producing a deletion prompt.

There's a website I used at my previous job called showmypc.com and it's a pretty useful and free shadowing service; if you can right click and not automatically get the deletion prompt, then perhaps it is the keyboard on his end. And I agree, something like this would be 100x easier to diagnose with PC in hand.

 

[Coprolite]

It sounds like a potential stuck key on the keyboard? I don't memorize that many keyboard shortcuts, so this is mainly a stab in the dark.

 

[sxg6]

Most likely a stuck delete key on keyboard. CTRL + D + click also prompts to delete, but most likely just the delete key in my opinion. Laptop keyboards are pretty cheap and easy to replace, I'd probably just swap it out personally.

 

[matrass]

thanks for the suggestion so far. I told him to try and plug an external; keyboard to it and see how that goes ( hoping that it would work and the laptop keyboard needs to be replaced ) will find out after work today how it went for him.

 

[Brandon Gatz]

If you reloaded Vista from a retail disk, instead of an included restore disk or partition, it's likely that many of the hardware drivers did not get installed. Using Join.me or the TeamViewer app, you can remotely connect to his system to verify what drivers are missing.

 

[Doog]

Did you try Windows update?