certain keys not working on High Sierra for one specific user account
My wife's 2011 MPB (MacBookPro8,1) started getting weird last week: the trackpad was behaving erratically and certain keys weren't working. Everything worked fine with an external keyboard/mouse, so we assumed this was all mechanical and went through tons of steps we found for cleaning, etc., but nothing worked.
Luckily, I had an identical model laptop on hand so I put her hard drive into it and we were shocked to find the keyboard problems remained (though trackpad seems fine). The keys not working are
789
uio
jkl
m.
Notice how they're all the right side of the keyboard, pretty much lined up vertically with each other, and always sequences of adjacent keys, except for on the bottom row where the comma between the m and the . works.
The kicker is, these keys work fine on other user accounts. Something's gone corrupt in the main user account on this machine and I'm not finding good articles on how to repair that. Other details:
- problem persists in safe mode
- I've run First Aid in Disk Utility, no effect
- Tried removing the com.apple.keyboardtype.plist
- Went into Keyboard preferences and remove a non-US keyboard profile option that had been set up (but never selected apparently)
I'm currently following some directions I found on other sites to re-apply Read/Write privileges to her entire user folder fro the Get Info/Sharing & permissions section, then run
diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`
...but open to other things to try next if this doesn't work.
