After resuming from Sleep keyboard works in Linux but no longer in Windows. What should I do?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #56, I look at a keyboard that has stopped working from an obvious
software issue.

Keyboard doesn’t work

Well, first of all, I think that booting into Linux was brilliant. It’s
something that I often recommend people try when they are experiencing assorted
different kinds of hardware problems; keyboard ones being a good example.

The fact that the keyboard works, and works well in Linux, implies (as you
might expect) that this is a completely software driven issue on the Windows
side.

What happened?

Now, the question is what happened?

Good question, I honestly don’t know. And in fact, I think your
recommendation, your thought of potentially doing a repair install of Windows,
is probably the most expeditious solution.

Naturally, I would back up first if you haven’t been backing up already. But
a repair install is exactly what I think the doctor calls for in this case.

Windows repair install

These are things that a repair install should in fact correct for you. If
they don’t, then I suspect you’ve got something else going on. It’s hard to say
what.

A repair install really should clear this up, which is why I almost
immediately lean towards doing that.

Reinstall the drivers

Another approach that you might want to consider (that is short of a repair
install) is for those drivers in device manager that have the exclamation
points – delete them.

This is actually a fairly common way to force Windows to redetect and
reinstall device drivers for devices that are having problems. Typically, it’s
done with USB devices and such, but it’s a very quick way to get Windows to say,
“I have no idea what kind of a keyboard this is. Let’s go figure it out. And
once I figure it out, let’s install the right drivers for it.”

It’s just shy of a repair install; the focus is just on the keyboard. So,
you might try that.

• I’ve got an article on deleting
  drivers as a way to perform this kind of repair install on a specific
  device.

• And I’ve also got another article on doing a repair
  install of Windows 7.

So, I would suggest either of those approaches. In your shoes, just because
I’m curious, I’d probably try the driver approach first, deleting the drivers
and rebooting and seeing what happens. If that doesn’t work, then absolutely I’d
go directly to the repair install.

And of course, (I have to caveat all this with) the very first thing I would
do is backup the entire system.