Being at home this week means that I have had a stack of “jobs” to get through (and I haven’t completed most of them… although at least the decorating is done) but it also means I’m “on call” for family IT issues.

This morning, my wife exclaimed that Windows Media Player was “throbbing” in the taskbar on her Windows 7 computer. Sure enough, there it was, pulsing away to suggest an alert but there was no dialog asking for input. I closed Media Player and it came back; I killed the process via Task Manager and it came back; I did what every self-respecting PC support guy would do and asked when she last rebooted the computer and Mrs W replied that she had already tried that (as every self-respecting user will respond to such advice!)…

Fearing a virus I decided to search the net for advice and found a Tom’s Hardware forum post which suggested it might be a stuck media key. Sure enough, examining the external keyboard shown that was the problem! A quick nudge on the key and Windows Media Player started to behave itself again…