XP keyboard driver keeps getting corrupted

[milleron]

Lately, every week or so my XP Pro system freezes as soon as I hit the first key after booting. If I use only the mouse to do things, it runs well, but hitting any key immediately freezes the system and requires a cold reboot. In Device Manager, it shows the keyboard but indicates it's not working because the driver cannot be loaded or is corrupt. If I uninstall the keyboard and try to reinstall it using the New Hardware Wizard, it reports that it cannot find a driver more up-to-date than the one that's "already installed." Of course that driver is corrupt and cannot be loaded.

The ONLY solution is to use Acronis True Image to go back a few days -- i.e., restore the entire C: drive (no data is lost because that's all stored on another drive). I've run Checkdisk, and it reports no errors

WHAT could be causing this repeated corruption of the keyboard driver? Could it be a failing hard disk? Is there any way to reinstall a keyboard driver short of restoring the entire C: drive as I've been doing?? If I knew the name of all the files the XP keyboard driver uses, I could simply restore those from the True-Image backup.

 

[MadRat]

There was a virus awhile back that attached to your system via the keyboard driver, but that was years ago. Put a read only attribute to the k/b driver files and see if that helps. What AV are you using?

 

[milleron]

I use Norton AV 2009 which updates itself at least every day.
As I said in my original post, I'm not sure which files make up the keyboard driver. I was hoping a knowledgable person would identify them for me. In the meantime, I WILL put the read-only attribute on the files that appear from their names to be keyboard drivers. Thanks!

 

[MadRat]

Go into the device manager and look under the keyboard entry for the specific files in question.