Keyboard adding hyphens in front of some letters when typing?

[Oreos]

I'm at my wit's end here, hopefully someone can help.

I have a Pavilion dv6, at the begining of the month I accidentally put it into 'hibernate' mode instead of shutting it down. When I booted it back up the built-in keyboard was losing its mind (typing and deleting and such) so I just restarted it but the problem persisted. Plugged in a USB keyboard and that worked well enough to login but then I was fighting with the keyboard to do anything, I'm not sure how relevant the particulars of this are but I wound up pulling the built-in keyboard out, reset all the drivers, but when I put the keyboard back in it kept adding in hyphens and typing -qerwiuPO (which a quick googling led me to believe there was a hardware issue). Ordered a new keyboard but left the old one detached--but left the laptop on with a chat window open just to make sure it wasn't doing anything weird, and it did, it typed, and sent, variations of "-qerwiuPO" even with no keyboard and no input attached (for example it would also write just "PO" "wiu" "------" etc.)

Got the new keyboard, installed it, it worked flawlessly for a few days and now, suddenly, when I type the letters "q", "w", "e", "r", "u", "i", "o", and "p" it automatically inserts hyphens in front of each letter. So if I write "working hard" on it right now it returns "-w-o-rk-ng ha-rd". Unless I hold down 'shift' in which case it types normally, with no hyphens.

I've tried reseting the drivers again, I've tried reseting the BIOS, I've installed a newer BIOS, I've scanned for viruses, I've changed the Keyboard and Languages settings, I've tried changing the repeat delay and repeat rate. I can't restore to a point before this whole sorry mess happened because I forgot that system resotres existed until it was too late.

I can only assume it's a software issue because the hardware is new. I just really hope there's a fix that isn't reinstalling the OS. Help?

[MKazi]

@Oreos

Welcome to HP Support Forums. 🙂 

Let me take a moment to thank you for posting on the HP Support Forums. 

I understand that you have an HP Pavilion dv6 series laptop. I read that the keyboard doesn't work correctly. I have read your post comprehensively and I appreciate the steps you have performed and have certainly done a good job.

I suggest you to try running a hardware test on the keyboard. The following steps will help:

• Shutdown the laptop.

• Hold the power button for at least five seconds to turn off the computer.

• Turn on the computer and immediately press Esc repeatedly, about once every second. When the menu appears, press the F2 key.

• On the main menu, click Component Tests.

• The Component Tests menu displays. Your Component Tests menu might be different, depending on the components installed on your computer.

• Please initiate a Keyboard Test - The Keyboard test provides a quick interactive functional test of the keys on the keyboard. A keyboard is required for this test.

  To run the test, click Keyboard, and then click Run once. The Keyboard Test time is 3 minutes.

If the keyboard test fails then please contact our HP phone support to explore the hardware service options for the laptop. 

I hope this information helps. Please feel free to let me know how it goes. Cheers! 🙂