How to stop keys from repeating when typing

[michaln]

I am using an external USB keyboard. Would that matter?

No -- probably over 99% users have USB keyboards, whether external or built into a laptop etc. If you set up the guest to emulate a USB keyboard (which you most likely didn't), that would matter.

[rockie12_us]

How do I do that

[loukingjr]

How do I do that

you don't want to do that.

[rockie12_us]

So how do I stop this annoying repeating keys that happens randomly?

[loukingjr]

So how do I stop this annoying repeating keys that happens randomly?

well, no one has said it yet but it's not a VirtualBox problem but a WIndows XP problem so you will probably have better luck looking on forums for Windows.

[bennelong]

Just enable remote display (Settings/Display/Remote Display) and connect to the VM using a RDP client eg Remote Desktop Connection for OSX or MSTSC for Windows.

You should get normal keyboard behaviour from the remote client.

[rockie12_us]

My Mac OS has 2gb of ran. It is a 1.8ghz intel Mac. When the vb is running the free memory on the Mac will get down to 26mb. Might that have something to do with it? It will work for days and then just start wiggling out. Just thought I would ask if that was a reason. I gave the vm 512mb of ram I am running xp

[cmoredock]

So there is no resolution to this issue? Yikes.

[robertb]

The guest is Linux.

I have no external USB keyboard, and this problem seems to occur even when not running X-Windows in the guest, i.e., the sticky key duplicates happen even in the linux console window. I also have the guest additions installed.

Is there still no way to fix this problem? Must I live with the key repeating and key drops?

[michaln]

Is there still no way to fix this problem? Must I live with the key repeating and key drops?

Unfortunately to fix this, the problem first needs to be reproduced and analyzed. There's a set of people seeing the problem and a set of people capable of fixing it. Apparently the intersection of the two sets is empty.

You have three options: a) tell us how to reproduce the problem (there's clearly some key ingredient we're missing), b) fix the problem yourself and submit a patch, or c) live with it.

[David P. Caldwell]

I can certainly confirm this happens, also on OS X host, with a different guest operating system. Here's all I know:

Host OS: OS X 10.8.5
VirtualBox: 4.3.0 r89960
Guest OS: FreeBSD 9.2 (amd64) with guest additions

I just experienced it for the first time (new OS X machine), which led me here after Googling. So I don't have a lot of experience with it yet.

But the behavior is exactly as described. The one thing I'd emphasize: it happens when I'm typing QUICKLY. Does not happen when I am typing slowly, at least yet. As I'm typing quickly when it happens, it is *definitely* not caused by key repeating (which happens *much* more slowly).

I would be more helpful if I could be; obviously if someone can point me in the right direction on doing more diagnostics I'd be happy to do that.

-- David P. Caldwell

[David P. Caldwell]

I can report a bit more.

First, I'm getting the "sticking" when running NetBeans on OpenJDK7 inside the FreeBSD guest.

It does seem to be something related to key release, as someone earlier suggested.

I was typing along and tried to type:

y(

... and got:

yYYYYYYYY(

So you can see the sequence the application / computer / whatever controls Java input saw. It saw me hit the y key, then saw me hit SHIFT, then saw me either hold down Y -- combined with an incorrect repeat rate -- or hit it several more times.

This is happening much, much more rapidly than the host or guest is supposed to repeat keys when one holds them down. I'm typing very rapidly and yet getting sometimes half-a-dozen keys in between two keystrokes (as I did above).

I can keep providing more as I see it and/or if people help direct me.

-- David P. Caldwell

[michaln]

I can keep providing more as I see it and/or if people help direct me.

Attaching VBox.log to a problem report is never a bad idea...

What I'm wondering about is whether the problem happens in VMs configured with a single VCPU or whether the VM must have more than one VCPU configured to show the problem?

[David P. Caldwell]

I am getting mysql errors on the server when I attempt to attach log files.

I can confirm the problem happens also with 1 CPU (I had multiple CPUs before).

I am going to check one other possibility. My "old" setup -- FreeBSD i386 guest on Windows 7 host -- worked fine. But my new setup (FreeBSD guest on OS X host) has one other difference -- I was attempting to use the amd64 version of FreeBSD as the guest. I will try the i386 version and see if it also exhibits the same behavior.

[michaln]

I am getting mysql errors on the server when I attempt to attach log files.

Exact error message please... you clearly still managed to attach the log -- thanks!

I can confirm the problem happens also with 1 CPU (I had multiple CPUs before).

Okay, that is good to know.

I am going to check one other possibility. My "old" setup -- FreeBSD i386 guest on Windows 7 host -- worked fine. But my new setup (FreeBSD guest on OS X host) has one other difference -- I was attempting to use the amd64 version of FreeBSD as the guest. I will try the i386 version and see if it also exhibits the same behavior.

Changing two variables at once is never good I strongly suspect it's the host OS change though.

One more thing... could you try configuring the VM to use USB keyboard emulation (I hope that works with FreeBSD)? VBoxManage modifyvm <vmname> --keyboard usb. To get back to the original configuration, replace 'usb' with 'ps2'.