Back on March 13, 2016, I posted the following:

As for my network speed, it started because I was getting really tired of my SSH sessions being clogged with strange control characters and other weirdness including sudden session drops. When I went to check SSH on other machines including my mac and my other win7 box, there were no issues at all. That meant it was my current win7 machine.

In that post, I indicated that updating the NVIDEA drivers and disabling some of the more useless driver functions helped, but did not cure the problem.

Slow forward to last week. The problem still persisted. It did not matter what machine I connected to with SSH, it was always bad. Worst was the PiDP8. It was totally impossible to use the PDP8 editor because the spurious control characters generated my Win7 ssh sessions always killed the edit. I ended up using other means to get files onto the PiDP8.

It was bad in any SSH session – unix, linux, Raspbian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD. They all suffered. Even newer releases of Putty and other SSH clients did NOT fix the problem.

However…

My lighted Logitech keyboard started to fail. Gradually. Slowly. But eventually the control key was so bad that “ctrl-c + ctrl-v” did not cut-and-paste, but rather just inserted ‘c’ and ‘v’ wherever used. Working with Excel became almost impossible. Emails had to be carefully checked to ensure I had not messed them up.

I finally had enough, and did some Google searches on decent inexpensive lighted keyboards. The only condition was I would not pay over $150 for a keyboard. In the end a high rated keyboard was the AZIO lighted keyboard. $45 with free shipping from Amazon.ca, and wired USB like my old one.

It arrived, I unplugged the old Logitech, plugged in the new Azio… and the machine froze. A quick reboot and it was fine. Probably just a driver hand-over glitch.

But what happened next had me totally baffled.

ALL OF MY SSH SESSIONS WORKED PERFECTLY. Yep – after swapping out the Logitech keyboard for an Azio keyboard, the very next ssh session had no key glitches. Zero. None. Nada. And the session after that, and the session after that, …

It’s now been almost two weeks since the new keyboard, and every ssh login has been clean and glitch free.

My best guess is that either there was something amiss with the logitech keyboard driver, or some weird interaction. The keyboard never gave any problem at all (until the control key failure) when used on windows, ONLY when running an ssh session.

Very strange. Very strange indeed.