This is on that Dell GX260 I got recently. Just to be safe: 2.80ghz Pentium 4, 128mb AGP Geforce ti4200, SB Audigy 2, 512mb ram, uses Plop Boot Manager to dual-boot Win98SE and Windows XP (the two Windowses can't see each other but there is a shared data partition).

The keyboard in question is one I got years ago, its some Hewlett-Pacard USB model I got at Wal-Mart that I've been using ever since.

Here's the odd thing: when I boot this PC up in Win98SE, there's NO odd behavior whatsoever. The keyboard does its thing and all games and programs behave how I expect them to.

The oddities start in Windows XP (SP3).

First one I noticed was any time I start typing stuff in wordpad or notepad... whenever I have "quotes" (or even 'quotes' like these--they're on the same key) I have to press the button twice, then BOTH sets of quotes show up. So when I type "this" I have to hit the quote button twice, then go back and put the word this between the two quotes... though I also discovered if I hit the quote key then any letter both will show up at the same time in the order I typed them. I figured this might be normal behavior for XP but now I'm not sure.

Yesterday, I loaded up Dosbox and did some gaming. First Rayman--no odd behavior--then Doom--no odd behavior--then Wolfenstein 3D...

... There was odd behavior.

Specifically, I noticed Wolf3D (this being the copy off the ID Anthology collection. I suppose I could test other versions though) would do this thing where BJ would keep moving or turning a second AFTER I let up the key. I tried remapping the movement but no matter what controls I had set, this behavior remained.

For the record, this is Dosbox 0.74, downloaded off of Dosbox's own website. Its the installation executable.

Also for the record, this was using my default conf. One thing I always do when I install Dosbox is I set the desktop shortcut to point to C:\DOSBOXCONF\default.conf With the default being basically Dosbox's normal startup, but it automatically goes fullscreen and auto-mounts C:\DOSBOX_DRIVE_C as my C:\ drive. The conf directory is mainly just so they're not all nested behind walls and walls of subdirectories like some installations do it.

Now, I figured this might be just a Dosbox thing, but here's the catch:

I booted the comp up in Windows 98SE and played Wolf3D there. Now, this wasn't a reinstall--I directly copied the Dosbox_Drive_C directory to my shared-data drive and from there, copied it onto Windows 98SE's C: drive. I also copied the conf and set up the desktop shortcut the same way, and yes, this is the exact same version of Dosbox.

Wolf3D in Windows 98 did NOT display the same behavior. And it goes without saying that the wordpad double-quotes issue is also not present.

Same Dosbox. Same keyboard. Same PC even. Only thing that changes is the OS.

So... apparently XP somehow handles the keyboard differently, but thing is I'm having trouble finding any information about this online--apparently nobody but me has ever run into this!

I'm not sure what to do here. I thought maybe Stickykeys might've been enabled but I checked and, it isn't. But other than that there's actually no other special keyboard-related stuff I can check in Windows XP that tells me anything.

So I'm at a loss.

Any theories as to what's going on?

Thanks in advance. Also sorry if this is the wrong board but since this issue involved both a word processor and a game in Dosbox I wasn't sure where it qualified more.