If you recall I got myself a new keyboard when the old one died. Unfortunately it is one of those new fangled 104-key keyboards with a Windows Logo Key flanking each Alt key. Hitting this key brings up the Start Menu, interrupting whatever you were doing at the time.

Imagine how irritating it is to hit this key while you are doing some serious gaming. Bam, the game goes down, the desktop appears, and the Start Menu pops up. You would think that DirectX would just disable this key by default, but oh no, you can get to the Start Menu any time, whether you want it or not.

The usual dodge in Windows 95/98 was to not put in the software that made the extra keys go. But Windows 2000/XP automatically detects the keyboard and has no particular facility to change, remap, disable, or otherwise alter what the keys normally do.

Now there are people who actually sell a solution for this. But I just can’t seem to bring myself to pay ten bucks to disable something that is stupid by design and should have never been there in the first place. So I dug around the Internet and found what I was looking for. Install this hack into your Registry (by double clicking on it), reboot, and wham-o, the fix is in. Your Windows Logo Key will never bother you again.

So how do you bring up the Start Menu with the keyboard without the Windows Logo Key? Anyone who’s used Windows for any length of time will tell you that CTRL-Esc will bring up the Start Menu. This is the way it always should have been, since there is less chance of you hitting this combination when you are busy fraggin’.