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First post, by Coxis

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Hi guys,

So recently I bought a new mechanical keyboard for use with my Windows XP rig, which I built in 2010 and I've been using as a dedicated Windows XP gaming machine ever since I retired it a couple years ago. It's never given me any trouble until I connected the new keyboard to the machine. The keyboard in question is the Epomaker EP84. These are my system specs:

Intel i7-860 @ 3.4 GHz
ASUS P7P55DPro
4x4 GB RAM HyperX Fury DDR3 @ 1866Mhz (I know XP only sees 3.x GB)
Radeon HD 6950
Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer
Razer Deathadder Chroma mouse
Windows XP SP3 Pro 32bit

Games and their behaviors:

F.E.A.R.: Fear.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
NFS:U: Nfs.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
HL2: Hl2.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
Bioshock: The splash screen for the game appears, but the game never loads. No error.
Oblivion: The launcher opens, I click on play and the game never loads. No error.
Crysis: Launches without issues.

As soon as I disconnect the keyboard the games launch with no issues like before. Prior to getting the Epomaker I was using a standard PS/2 keyboard. I've tested with a couple generic USB keyboard and I have no issues, it's only after connecting the Epomaker that I get this behavior. The keyboard does not install any sort of special software or anything upon connection, neither on W10 nor XP. It just loads what appear to be standard USB drivers from Microsoft.

I hope you can help! I was very excited to replace the old keyboard I was using for gaming, and this EP84 is a much needed improvement. Once connected the keyboard works fine otherwise.

Reply 1 of 5, by DosFreak

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The manual states that it is compatible with Windows XP so support@epomaker.com shouldn't have a reason to not look into it.
Check dxdiag and device manager that nothing is odd with the keyboard.

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Reply 2 of 5, by Coxis

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The thing is though that the keyboard itself "works" fine. It just kills 5/6 games I have installed on the machine. When play testing it on Crysis and my W10 machine I had no issues. However e-mailing support is definitely an option, though I'm not sure how helpful they'll be.

Reply 3 of 5, by Coxis

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I managed to fix it. Looking at the crash error it said that the crash was related to dinput8.dll. Some people online reported DirectX games crashing when they had a USB device connected that was incorrectly detected as an input device. I corroborated this when I tried to run dxdiag and even that crashed.

I went into device manager, looked at my HID devices and found one that had "Location 0 Gaming Keyboard". I disabled that device and to surprise, the keyboard didn't stop working and all games now launched with no issues.

Reply 4 of 5, by dr_st

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Very good! Thanks for sharing. What a bizarre thing.

Do you have another OS installed on that PC, to see if this is an XP-specific or generic glitch?

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Reply 5 of 5, by Coxis

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No other OS on that machine, but I used the keyboard as my main keyboard for around a month on my main 9700k machine with no issues. Used it for moderate gaming and general computing. I bought a better one for my main rig and moved the Epomaker to my XP rig.

Very bizarre issue if you ask me. People online who had this issue reported having things like programming modules or other uncommon USB devices being misidentified as input devices, but not a keyboard.