wierd focus problem

Several machines at our office are displaying the same issue...

Open Internet Explorer or any office program (Outlook, Word, etc.) and begin working (or not) and at some random interval the focus will shift from the applicaons input window to the application menu bar. It is exactly the same effect that you would get if you pressed the Control ALT key.

I doesn't matter if you type anything or not, it is like something is causing the system to think you have pressed the control ALT key to start a hotkey sequence. If you then type something, the application uses your input as a hotkey.

We have only seen this on machines that are have Vista, Office 2007 and IE8 installed. Machines that are running XP and Office 2007 and machines running Vista and older versions of Office do not display this problem.

As I am typing this IE's menu bar has been selected three times so far. This is very annoying at best.

This problem has been found on a toshiba laptop, a dell laptop, a sony laptop, and a powerspec desktop.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Edited: I was thinking Control key for some reason... I should have said Alt key

This is a tough one. There are 2 things you could try:

1. Uninstall IE8 and go with IE7 - just for testing and only on 1 system. The IE8 has created problems in several areas - this could be one of them.
2. Disable all startup programs for a test and see whether that cures the problem. If yes - you'll have to reenable them one by one to find the culprit.

Another question you should analyse is whether the systems in question have any particular programs installed that are not on the systems without problems. The problem could be interference from any program.

Thanks for the response.

I will try to uninstall IE and then Office and try other versions on those same machines - but only as a last resort. I was hoping to see if anyone had heard of this and if they maybe knew of a solution first.

#2 is much more agreeable to me and I will try this over the weekend on my laptop (the toshiba).

There is nothing installed that is very different from other machines here. But we don't have any others yet with this particular configuration... we are standardizing on XP or Vista (user's choice), Office 2007, and leaving the browser up to the user. I am holding up the migration until I figure out what is going on.