Windows XP Professional - Really Wierd Stuff

Good Morning, Micronetters

Funny thing happened to my system yesterday I have not found an answer
for yet.

I received an excel spreadsheet from my boss yesterday with the holiday
schedule. I opened it, because I trusted it and knew it was being sent
at that time, viewed the data and then closed and filed it away.

About five minutes later my hard drive started running all the time. I
wasn't doing any thing in particular and I do have programs that run in
the system tray that cause this, i.e. SpySweeper and Diskeeper, and will
run from a few minutes to ten minutes in the background.

Twenty minutes later the drive was still running and the system was kind
of slow. As I was going to hit ctrl+alt+del to view task manager to see
what service was running a user came up behind me to ask me a question.
As I looked back at my computer the entire windows screen desktop and
all flipped clock wise 90 degrees. I had to look at it sideways to read
the screen. In addition my mouse started to float on its own all over
the screen.

Well, my first thought was maybe the excel spread sheet carried a virus
to my machine. I ran A/V on my bosses machine and it found about 8 files
that were infected (not the excel spreadsheet tho). I cleaned them off.

I restarted my machine a few times to see if I could get the mouse back
(oh yea, I did remember to disconnect from the network immediately when
the screen went sideways). After the second restart I got the mouse
back. I ran my A/V. There were no viruses. Hmmmm!

I decided to experiment. When I hit ctrl+alt+del I began to wonder if I
hit some other key other than del. After some experimentation I hit
ctrl+alt+arrow keys and wham the screen turned upside down. I kept at it
till I got the screen back.

You might say, he figured it out and you would be right except that I
went to several like machines (XP Pro, ZA, etc basically set up the same
as mine) and tried hitting the ctrl+alt+arrow keys with no effect on
them at all.

Anyone have any idea's what is going on with my machine. I seem to be
the only one who can use these keys to change the orientation of my
screen. I tried google'ing and found that those key combinations work in
some program environments but nothing came up about them in a Windows
O/S, i.e. XP Pro. What did I miss on this? I found no reference to these
shortcut key combination in my Windows books.

Respectfully,

Charles

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Charles E. James, P/A II
IST/Student Information Systems
U. C. Berkeley California
510-642-8440
-----------------------------------------
"To be wronged is nothing...unless
you continue to remember it." - Confucius
"If you see a problem, it's yours.
If you think somebody should do something about it,
remember, you're as much a somebody as anybody." - Center for Zen Buddhism
"Don't talk unless you can improve the silence" -Tshirt in Vermont
Concentrating completely on someone is the single
best thing you can do to make that person feel
significant.
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