For Windows experts who enjoy a challenging puzzle, and have nothing better to do, I have run into something that is very minor, but is slowly driving me crazy, as these things do.

I run Win 7 Home premium on my main computer as a matter of preference. I use Windows Live Mail (Essentials 2012) for popmail (and no, I don’t want to switch to Thunderbird or another option). I have my email viewer set to text only. In Live Mail you can switch this to HTML by pressing Alt-Shift-H.

This works fine on my old computer but I am changing to a slightly faster one with the same software set-up and I can’t get it to work on that one. It is a head-scratcher. I have gone through everything I can think of that might affect this, without result. I have checked the keyboard setting in Regions and Languages to make sure the keys are not doing anything weird. I have checked the scancode map in the Registry editor to make sure no keys have been reassigned. I have checked that I do not have any other memory-resident software running that would affect this. The accelerator keys all seem to work normally in Live Mail. So do the other hot keys. Pressing Alt-Shift in combination with every other function works normally. The only thing that doesn’t work is Alt-Shift H, but this does work correctly on the other computer.

I have used a tester to check the keypresses and something strange occurs that I do not understand. On the computer that works, I get a key down code of 72 when I press Alt-Shift H. This is correct as it is the key code for the H key. Yet on the computer that doesn’t work, this does not happen. When I press Alt-Shift H I get no key down at all, though I do get a normal key up. If I press H on its own, I do get the key down code. Alt-H also works. So does Shift-H. Just not Alt-Shift H. Somehow when Alt-Shift are pressed together, the H key no longer works. Yet it works normally with every other possible combination. Alt-Shift also works normally with every other key.

Does anyone have any idea what could be going on here? I certainly don’t.