You could have someone controlling your computer via something like Back Orifice or PCAnywhere, although I would have thought McAfee or Norton would find BO.

If it still happens when you're unplugged from the internet, then it's something already on your computer.

Are you running any kind of firewall?

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just good advice.

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Also if you are running Windows NT (including 2000 or XP), look at the "processes" window of task manager, sort in descending order on the CPU column and look to see what is burning CPU when the funny typing is happening. You may find a program name that you can use to search for a solution.

If you have system recovery turned on you can try rolling back your system to a date before the problem started. (Backup any recent work you have done first ! )

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Random words and characters mysteriously appearing on the screens of some Windows XP and Office XP users are not the work of phantom hackers or a sign that users' systems are possessed by demons. It's just Microsoft's voice recognition system running slightly amok, the company said.

In recent weeks, several XP users have posted messages to Internet discussion lists and newsgroups reporting that text is automatically appearing in Internet Explorer's address bar or in Outlook e-mail messages or Word documents as users compose them.

In a posting entitled "My Remote Keyboard is Possessed in XP," for example, one Microsoft customer reported "very strange behavior" that included letters appearing in input areas of the screen while browsing and writing e-mails.

"I'm afraid Holy Water would short it out so someone please help me," wrote the XP user.

Another Microsoft customer separately reported that "a ghost" appeared to be taking over his computer. In the message, entitled "Phantom Menace XP," the user said something was causing toolbars and options to pop up without his input.

In response to user inquiries, in January Microsoft published a handful of articles in the Support section of its Web site about the problem.

According to Microsoft, after installing Microsoft's Speech application programming interface, "random words or characters may be displayed in Office XP documents or in the Internet Explorer Address bar."

The company said the behavior occurs because "the speech recognition tool is 'listening' to your voice through you computer's microphone and is attempting to recognize what you are saying."

Microsoft said its speech recognition engine, a program file named Sapisvr .exe, is turned on at installation by some computer manufacturers. The engine is also included with Microsoft Office XP and other speech-enabled products.

To resolve the problem, Microsoft said XP users should disable the Dictation and the Voice Command features on the operating system's Language bar. Alternately, users can turn off speech recognition completely from the Regional and Language Options tool on XP's Control Panel.

Merely unplugging or turning off the computer's microphone does not correct the random-character problem, according to several user reports.

Microsoft's article about random characters in Office XP is at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315765.

Microsoft's article on configuring speech recognition in Windows XP is at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q306537.

Microsoft's .NET Speech homepage is http://www.microsoft.com/speech/.

Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com.

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Bill

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