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Question

Hot Key & Power Management Problems

Jun 13, 2012 6:44AM PDT

Two problems:

I seem to have lost the ability to use my CUT/COPY/PASTE hot keys. I ran msconfig and checked the Startup tab and my zHotkey.exe entry IS checked, so it should be loading those settings.

Also my power scheme only seems to work partially. The monitor turns off after 3 min, as set, but the system will not suspend or go to sleep at 5 min, as it is set to do.

I imagine both of these involve registry tweaks or changes to a process, but I'd appreciate any knowledge anyone could share.

Both of these had been working fine in the recent past. My system is otherwise clean and free if viruses. I miss the use of my hot keys, and I'd like the PC to go to sleep when idle.

Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
A recent spat of copy/paste failures points to Skype.
Jun 13, 2012 11:00AM PDT

You'll have to tell a lot more for folk to guess what's installed. Why make us guess?

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Answer
On the power management end
Jun 14, 2012 12:00AM PDT

On the power management end, this is a long standing bug in XP that will probably never be fixed. I first noticed it in the early SP2 days, so that was what 5-6 years ago?

The workaround I came across that seems to work, is you go into the settings, and change something about the power save settings, and then once you apply those changes they will "stick". You can then optionally change it back to what you had before.

The final thing you need to do is get rid of all this registry nonsense you have floating around in your head. At your technical level, there's no real reason you even need to know the registry exists, let alone be contemplating the prospect of spelunking around in there. Incidentally, while I'd go with Bob's idea of Skype first, registry "cleaners" and similar scam programs can actually be responsible for issues like you are describing.