Actually I'm in the third day of being only able to type on a virtual keyboard... that means pointing the mouse and clicking on each letter to compose and type something. None of the attempts to work with different keyboards has worked. Nothing tried has corrected the situation and I may have made it worse with an attempted fix to the registry, a few rollbacks and a registry clean. Maybe all that is the creation of a perfect storm on my computer.
Sine I am running W7, I am gambling that the update to W8 will get things back in order. As soon as it is delivered today we'll find out. If the fix is not there, then trouble. The HP desktop is 3.5 years old and in recent years that is about their life expectancy. This one may have been done in by Kaspersky 2013 and the transition to 2014 - the second year in a row that their product is garbage. There is a little over 400 days remaining on my KIS subscription - not sure if I will just junk it.
Oh well, over 20 minutes spent typing this so far on the virtual keyboard and that is enough. Someday I may look back and laugh about this situation - but not today!