Last weekend, a family member stopped by the house so I could take at an issue with her laptop. I managed to recreate the error, and fired up my work laptop so I could “Bing it”. (Yes, I wear that like a badge of honor!).

At the login prompt, I banged away on the keyboard, hit enter, and was dropped into the “Formerly-Known-As-Metro” interface.

At this point I hit Window-D to get into the familiar Windows Desktop interface, but was instead mocked with a beeping sound for each keystroke I typed. The mouse worked, but that was it.

Okay, screw it…I grabbed the Surface RT. I drew my picture password, and again was now sitting at the tablet-y interface. (seriously, what’s that new interface called?) Same thing again, Window-D, and mocked with failure. I tried the Windows button, and all it did was vibrate…it didn’t actually do anything.

Okay, I’m feeling *just* a bit embarrassed at this point…

Finally, I grabbed my laptop and threw it into my office docking station, and logged in. Since I have dual monitors, one screen shows the Windows Desktop interface, the other shows the new interface. Immediately I recognized an icon in the notification area down by the clock. FilterKeys? OMG.

So here it goes. Signing into Windows 8 with a Microsoft Account is awesome. All my game saves, favorites, browser history, backgrounds/themes…all synced between machines. And therein lies the problem.

The night before, our 3 year old daughter wanted to play a Disney game on their website. It uses Flash, so the iPad was out - I had let her use the Surface RT. At some point she managed to turn on FilterKeys and that setting got replicated across all my machines.