I’ve found the solution and thought I’d post here for others that may be having the same/similar difficulty.
The problem on my system was a conflict between PhotoShop CS2 and a Windows background process called "hkcmd.exe" which implements keyboard shortcuts for Intel based graphics chips. I did as Adobe recommended and updated my video drivers, but as this is installed as part of the drivers for Intel graphics chips it didn’t fix my issue. I finally took to killing suspicious tasks one at a time to find the culprit, which is how I found hkcmd.exe was the cause.
The good news is that (as far as I can tell) hkcmd doesn’t appear to be necessary as my graphics drivers are still functioning fine after I’ve removed it (I went into regedit, searched for hkcmd and deleted all entries). From searching online I see that hkcmd is known to conflict with other apps, so it seems that it’s likely the cause rather than PhotoShop. Why PhotoShop and hkcmd suddenly started to cause conflicts after months of proper functioning, I don’t know.
Seeing as my symptoms were identical in ImageReady, I’d recommend that Adobe add removing hkcmd.exe to their remedy suggestions for those of us having keyboard issues with CS2.
Thanks,
Ric
