My close parentheses mysteriously does not work!

Question

My close parentheses mysteriously does not work!

My right/close parentheses key has stopped working. This is the parentheses you type by pressing shift and then pressing the "0" key. Every other key on the keyboard seems to be working, included shifted keys. Also, I have two different keyboards, one is a microsoft ergonomic keyboard and the other is the standard Apple wireless keyboard that came with my computer. Both have the same problem so it's not the keyboard itself. I have a Mac Pro running the latest OS 10.5.6. I called Apple Service and Support and they were baffled. They sent me to a second level guy and he was baffled and he said I have to reinstall Leopard or create a new user and transfer my settings to the new user. I'd rather not have to do that. I'd rather figure out what's causing it. Does anyone have any clue what might be causing this? The only other post I saw on this ended with the person reinstalling Leopard but didn't answer what the underlying problem was.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6), MacBook Pro

Posted on Jan 25, 2009 9:00 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 25, 2009 9:37 PM in response to Tumbling Dice

Hello and Welcome to Apple Discussions...

Try downloading and installing the 10.5.6 combo update. It can fix a number of issues.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosx1056comboupdate .html

Make sure and run Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities) and Repair Disk Permissions BEFORE and AFTER you install the update.
Launch Disk Utility. (Applications/Utilities) Select MacintoshHD in the panel on the left, select FirstAid, then click: Repair Disk Permissions. Quit DU when it's finished and reboot.

Carolyn 🙂

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Answer 2

Apr 2, 2009 11:27 AM in response to Tumbling Dice

I have the exact same problem. Did you ever figure out what the problem was? I've raised the issue with Apple support and they gave me the same recommendation. I really would prefer not to have to reinstall the OS as that would mean a huge amount of time and hassle and possible loss of data or applications. And like you I would really like to find out what the underlying problem is.
A couple additional clues:
[1] when I log in as a different user, the problem goes away.
[2] Also, yesterday I reformatted one of my internal disk drives, though not the startup disk and the close parenthesis started working again for little while. Here's the details on what I did: The disk I reformatted contained lots of Quicktime videos and Final Cut Pro projects, which I temporarily moved to another disk while I reformatted it. After I reformatted the disk and moved the files back to it, the close parenthesis started working temporarily - but mysteriously when I pulled up iWork Pages documents I could not see the contents of the documents. The documents opened up normally and acted as if there was text in them but I could not see the text. I then opened and closed Pages a couple times and restarted the computer. Pages started working correctly again. I then worked on a Final Cut project and shut the computer down for the night. This morning when I woke up, the close parenthesis was no longer working. Unfortunately, I did not test the close parenthesis right after Pages started working again last night - so I'm not sure exactly when the problem resurfaced.

Have you figured out what might be causing this problem, or has anyone else out there?

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,210 points

Apr 2, 2009 11:42 AM in response to Tumbling Dice

Whenever a particular key does not work, double-check system preferences/speech and universal access to make sure that the key in question is not listed as a trigger for some special function.

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Answer 4

Apr 4, 2009 4:00 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

You are absolutely right. I saw your entry just after I got off the phone with Apple Support and they had me look at the same thing. Sure enough, the keyboard shortcut for "speak selected text when the key is pressed" was "shift + 0". You can reach this preference by going to System Preferences/Speech/Text to Speech and either unchecking the check box next to "speak selected text when the key is pressed" or by hitting "Set Key" and changing the keyboard shortcut for this function. Yay! I'm very glad to have this resolved as this was an annoyance that was bothering me for months and two prior calls to Apple Support failed to solve it.

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