Solved MS Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 No longer working

[MrH]

I have a MS Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard. It has been working fine for...well, two years? Sometime ago I performed a Windows Update and the keyboard stopped working. Reinstalled the MS Keyboard & Mouse Center and it worked fine. This weekend I rebooted my computer (Windows Updates again), came into work Monday and the keyboard stopped working. Reinstalling MS Keyboard & Mouse Center doesn't make a difference.

-Windows 7 detects when I plug in the keyboard, even the model model (picture and all), but the PnP interface can not find the driver. (Still doesn't work when I install it via MS Keyboard & Mouse Center, even though the program installs fine).
-I have gone in and removed ALL USB devices, rebooted, and the keyboard works UNTIL the Windows 7 PnP starts detecting hardware. Then it breaks the keyboard again.
-This keyboard works on another Windows 7 computer, as well as a Linux computer.
-The keyboard is getting power
-The keyboard works at bootup (F8, Bios, etc)
-Plugging in a standard keyboard (Dell) works fine.
-Restoring to an earlier restore point hasn't helped.

Any thoughts? Is there anyway to find just that specific keyboard driver, without installing the MS Center (which obviously doesn't work?) Any help would be greatly appreciated, my hands don't work well on standard keyboards (they literally hurt), so I'm really hoping to get an ergo keyboard working again.

Jon

 

[TVeblen]

I suggest uninstalling ALL keyboard software, clean up any remnants, and then go into Device Manager and expanding the Keyboard selection > right click on the keyboard > properties > Drivers Tab > Uninstall.
The keyboard should then be uninstalled fron Device Manager, but if it isn't, right click on the keyboard listed under Keyboards > and Uninstall.

Then restart the computer. Windows should load a generic keyboard driver (providing it does not find any of that old software/driver stuff) and you should have all normal keyboard functionality.

If that does not work you may need to do some more aggressive removal (registry editing) if you can't locate an un-installation program for that original package.

 

[MrH]

Managed to fix the problem (I had tried the above steps, couldn't get it to load a generic driver instead). However I did find this thread elsewhere which had a solution. It seems that Windows Update KB2529073 'fixed' some USB Driver issues...well, that ended up breaking this keyboard stuff apparently.

I uninstalled the update, rebooted, and viola, all works fine now, even typing this message on the previously undetected keyboard. I just told windows Update to hide that update so it never installs it again.

Thanks for the help.

 

[cleo48]

I had a similar issue. Particularly vexing was that my favorites keys ceased working which I used to link to online news sites.
All the recommended fixes failed. Particularly the new intellipoint 8.2 drivers. The eventual solution was to blow out all keyboard related drivers and re-install the intellipoint 7.1 drivers. These restored my keyboard to full function.

 

[NDboots]

I have Avast virus protection on a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro machine, and I think that is part of the reason IntelliType 8.2 did not work. As, Avast also installs a keyboard driver called aswJbd.sys. I suspect it is not up and up with the 8.2 version, but I like Avast and want to keep it installed.

So, I uninstall my fancy MS Mouse and Keyboard center, which left about 7 of my MS 4000 keyboard functions non-functioning. Then I searched Google for older versions that worked in the past. I installed for the mouse Intellipoint 7.0, and for the keyboard IntelliType 7.2, both downloaded from MS, and all is working well again. My favorite keyboard that does not cause my wrists to hurt, is back to full function again.

 

[TVeblen]

I did not know about aswJbd.sys. Thanks for the info!