This is half-rant, half question. Maybe 4 months ago a key was pressed on my keyboard which rendered it borderline useless for days - multiple reboots, driver reinstalls, win-spacebar, troubleshooters, ad nauseum. At this point I don't remember if it was NumLock, ScrollLock, or Pause. Fast forward to 4 days ago and the keyboard fails in a similar manner: can't type L,O,A,M,Y or @. Google doesn't help. Manufacturer removed features I need, so can't easily buy my way out of the problem. I wake up this morning, and apparently the cause of my problems is that the cat had hit F10 ("Game Mode"). Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, would something like that persist through a reboot?
I had a similar issue to this. My keyboard had a firmware issue, and the only way to reset it was to completely unplug the keyboard. The USB port it was connected to had 'always on' so even if the PC was restarting or shutdown, there was still powered going to the keyboard.