Tonight I switched on my old HP Omnibook XE3 laptop (for the first time in a few days - it's a second PC that sees relatively little use, mainly for surfing and listening to mp3s in the lounge over a LAN) and discovered a weird keyboard fault when trying to post on a message board.

Basically all the keys seem to be working fine besides G, H and Delete, to which there's no response when they're pressed. What leads me to wonder if it's a software rather than hardware issue such as a broken ribbon cable or whatever is the fact that the DEL key still works when doing a CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the Task Manager.

It's an old machine (runs Win98) but has served me well without missing a beat up until now and I'm aware that the cost of a new keyboard would effectively mean junking it. I do have the original HP intallation disk from when it was new which includes a HP version of Win98 and a load of other fairly pointless stuff but I don't really want to have to reinstall and reconfigure everything only for it to still not work so I thought I'd first see it it's something straightforward!

Any help would as always be gratefully received...

OK well I'm glad no-one's spent any time replying to this as it seems to have resolved itself - I tried it with an external keyboard last night which worked fine but the on-board one was still causing me problems, so I disconnected the external keyboard and rebooted it one last time more in hope than expectation - and would you believe it, problem solved! it's worked fine ever since, so please feel free to close the thread, and apologies for the panic...

Thanks for the update. Sorry we had no ideas for you but glad it worked itself out.

Let us know if we can help further in the future.