Strange keyboard problem.

[NatSpectrum]

Ok, so it's been a while since I last played Oblivion, and last time I played it it worked perfectly fine.

Now today I got a new graphics card (upgraded from a GTX 470 to a GTX 770), and decided to give it a spin with Oblivion - no changes, just the exact same setup as I used before.

So I load up my last save file, and the keyboard won't work. I can't move, can't get into the inventory or open the menu, all I can do is mouselook. Alt-Tab still worked though.

I had a hard time believing that upgrading my graphics card would somehow cause Oblivion to stop reading my keyboard, so I looked for other reasons. At first I thought it was ENB, as the keyboard seemed to become unresponsive as soon as the ENB startup message appeared at the main menu. That and the keyboard shortcut for the in-game ENB editor still worked. Tried removing the ENB, same problem as before.

So I completely uninstalled Oblivion, mods and all, completely fresh. I even deleted all my saves (didn't care for them) and the .ini file so that it would generate a new one. Reinstall it, start a new game, I can't skip past the intro movie nor can I move after character creation. Still ignores my keyboard.

So I read up about how apparently some Oblivion keyboard issues are caused by video codecs like FFShow, which I had for some reason (I honestly cannot remember installing it). I had no idea how to change the FFShow settings (no FFShow entry in the start menu), so I uninstalled it. Made no difference.

Now the strangest thing is that the steam overlay actually kindof fixes this problem. If I shift-tab to bring up the overlay and then shift-tab back to the game again, suddenly the game becomes responsive and the keyboard works fine. So I figured that somehow the steam overlay was causing it, so I tried disabling it...no dice, the game just continues to ignore my keyboard this time without the workaround to fix it.

So, yeah, that's as thorough a description as I can possibly. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this problem? I guess it's not the end of the world if I can't fix it (thanks to the steam overlay workaround), but i'm still completely baffled as to what caused this.

[Klapaucius]

I had the same exact problem with both Oblivion and Morrowind. With both games what I had to do to fix the problem was go into the .ini file and change bBackground Keyboard=0 to bBackground Keyboard=1 and that fixed the problem for me. Also, simply minimizing the games by alt tabbing in and out fixed it as well. It also somehow fixed the problem completely when I installed Windows 8. I also read it was caused by FFShow but no matter what I did or tried to do with FFShow the problem still continued. Either way it was and annoying issue that can be solved/semi solved by either bBackground Keyboard=1, alt tabbing or the Steam overlay tricks.

[NatSpectrum]

Holy cow that actually worked! Thank you so much!

Now I just gotta reinstall all my mods. :P

[✞ Skones ✞]

Originally posted by Klapaucius5691:

I had the same exact problem with both Oblivion and Morrowind. With both games what I had to do to fix the problem was go into the .ini file and change bBackground Keyboard=0 to bBackground Keyboard=1 and that fixed the problem for me. Also, simply minimizing the games by alt tabbing in and out fixed it as well. It also somehow fixed the problem completely when I installed Windows 8. I also read it was caused by FFShow but no matter what I did or tried to do with FFShow the problem still continued. Either way it was and annoying issue that can be solved/semi solved by either bBackground Keyboard=1, alt tabbing or the Steam overlay tricks.

this is what I need thank you

[Bookworm]

I had the problem with Oblivion and Morrowind.

[۞ sambo-5]

My keyboard work but Ihave onother problem my Oblivion game crash to often ,to thing if I do what you did it wil lfix this problem? I run validation catche and come out OK but I still have crashing problem,it crash every 20 minuits.I need good advice ,thanks .Same like you I got this game for long time and it didn't crush then but I have,newer CPU evga Gforce GTX 870 and my monitor is dell 28" 4K ,Is this be a reason for crushing?

[Elventin]

thank you for the help :)

[Mistrui]

alt tabbing crashes my game and the file change thing does nothing