hello, i found this the most suitable place to post this, so please refer me to another section if it is more suitable.

remember the shorcuts in windows let you assign a key combo for them which will run your shortcut? you push a letter on the keyboard and it automatically adds Ctrl + Alt + in front of it, or you can change them to Ctrl + Shift + Alt + or whatever else. well i set a few combos up, let's leave aside the fact that when you try to set it to Shift + Alt + F it disappears right away because it takes it that you are pressing Alt + F (Find location/open file location)...

now i have deleted the shortcut with the assigned key combo but the combo still works even though the shortcut is gone and when i try to assign the same combo to another shortcut it disappears again as soon as it comes up when i press it, opening the program that previous shortcut with that combo lead to.

i read on a forum that creating the same shortcut in the same location shows the shortcut key which can be removed from there, but i have no idea where it was and what it was called (which is exactly why i set a shortcut key to it). i found little topics like this and one ran a vbs script which supposedly removes all shortcut keys from the start menu and desktop, but i ran it to no avail.

any ideas? i'm using vista home basic

Basically the shortcut (or a copy of it) still exists either in one of the following locations (or inside a folder in one of these locations). Go find it and remove the hotkey associated with it (by going to its properties and hitting backspace over the hotkey you have set until it says "none"). Replace YOURUSERNAME with your actual username.

• C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
• C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Desktop
• C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
• C:\Users\Public\Desktop

ps: have fun with hidden files/folders/extensions, hidden system files/folder, and file permissions!


This post was edited by Azrad on May 23 2013 05:36am

(9^62773 + 2)^83721 solve this and your problems solved

Azrad, all the shortcuts are cleared but the shortcut key is still active for its old use and it cannot be disabled.

When windows boots, it searches each of these locations recursively for shortcuts with shortcut keys enabled. This is how windows knows what shortcut keys combos are associated with what *.lnk, *.pif, and *.url files. Somewhere in one of these locations (perhaps buried in a hidden folder) you have one of these with shortcut keys enabled on it. Find it and correct this.

Will print out any shortcut in those locations that has a key assigned to it

This post was edited by Azrad on May 24 2013 02:16pm

Can't you right click the programs original .exe which still have the hotkeys and erase the combo? Or?

If not try this. Go start menu > search > type "regedit" then find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. Next create a 32-bit DWORD named NoWinKeys, right click modify it to value 1. Log in and out and change the hotkey. Re-enable keys by modify the value to 0.

interesting

hey guys, it got randomly fixed by itself. the only thing that has changed since then is that i unplugged my computer shutting it down. i actually don't remember when the last time that i restarted it was because usually i put it to sleep overnight, maybe this was the reason why the shortcut key combo was left in the memory for so long, even after i've deleted the shortcuts.
anyways i'll start a new thread asking how to use Alt + Shift + F as a shortcut combo without causing the Open File Location to run the folder and make my combo disappear before i get to apply it. for one, i know that a solution would be to change the system language, so the "File Location" gets a different Alt key, but it's funny to imagine that would be the only way!

http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=67604573&f=120&o=0#p453048406

makes perfect sense:

You probably had the shortcut key enable and booted your computer (thereby loading that shortcut into the memory). Later you probably modified to the shortcut but this entry was still in the memory until you rebooted.

This post was edited by Azrad on May 28 2013 05:20am