Ctrl + 1 and Ctrl + 2 key combinations don't work

I noticed back in August (when I got StarCraft 2) that the key combinations Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 didn't work. I thought this was weird because Ctrl+3 and all the other combinations worked fine (including Shift+1, and etc), so I didn't think much of it; I just shrugged it off as a SC2 bug.

Now, 4 months later, I decided to play a completely unrelated game (Dawn of War 2) and noticed the same thing: those two specific key combinations don't work. To make sure I wasn't going insane, I tried it in Chrome and a couple other applications, and alas, it didn't work.

I remember playing strategy games over the summer before StarCraft 2 and it worked fine. Any idea as to what went wrong?

Things I've tried

• ActiveHotkeys says the key combination is not a global hotkey.
• Tried another keyboard--still didn't work.
• The key combinations worked in a virtual machine (tried with both Windows and Ubuntu as guests).
• Using Ctrl+1 as a hotkey to an AutoHotKey script worked.
• Using Ctrl+1 as the output of an AutoHotKey script didn't work.
• I terminated all non-essential processes, and the keys still didn't work.
• In Safe Mode, the key combinations didn't work.

I'm running out of ideas

What else could be going on? Could a program have set some kind of keyboard hook and just never released it? Is there a way for me to see the path that the input takes through the system, to perhaps see where it stops? I'm a programmer, so I'd be fine with writing some code to help me figure this out.

Solution 1:

You could try and use Signo: it can tell you which application uses a certain hotkey, though not always; and if Activehotkeys doesn't see a hook, then I don't expect Signo to either - but who knows.

For more testing, you could download VirtualBox, make a virtual machine (that is easy), install Windows on this virtual machine, and test the hotkeys there. If they still don't work, then it is probably some weird hardware thing.

Solution 2:

In my case this was caused by NVidia Geforce experience. It's not listed anywhere in the program under it's keyboard shortcuts - but uninstalling Geforce experience gave me my CRTL+1-3 keys back..

Great job Nvidia..