random spade character in text fields

[bigSparky]

Ok, so this started happening about two weeks ago. A spade character(like the suit in cards) keeps inserting itself into text fields, mostly in ones I have clicked on with the mouse, but not always. I can backspace it out but it often re-appears after I type a few characters into the text field. It is very annoying and I would love to fix it, but I am at a loss as to how. The other weird thing going on is that pages I have long since closed pop back open. This all happens in both Firefox and windows explorer. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Teanos]

Download Spybot Search and Destroy or Lavasoft's Adaware, make sure you don't have some sort of malware running.
Virus scan can't hurt either.

But the quicker thing to do would be to google what you are seeing and see if its the result of some character pack you might of installed, or some web toolbar, etc.

[bigSparky]

Thanks for the input. Turns out it was a very simple, very stupid thing. I have an LX8 cordless mouse that has a couple of side buttons. They are right where I grip the mouse and VERY sensitive to the touch. I set them to "do nothing" and it cured the problem. Now I just have to figure out why the screen keeps flipping 90 degrees. System restore usually takes care of it but it is actually quicker to reinstall vista when it does it. Weird but true.

[Teanos]

The 90 degree thing is because of either a quick button on the mouse/keyboard, or you are hitting the right key combination on your keyboard to rotate the screen based on your video card settings.

In the bottom right hand corner by the clock on your task bar, hover over until you see something that either says Intel Graphic Display, Nvidia Graphic Display, ATI Graphic Display, etc. (whatever video card you got.)

More often then not you can right click on it, and find screen rotation or something and "flip 90 degrees".

[bigSparky]

Yeah, I haven't figured out what buttons I'm pushing yet to cause it. But after the clean install of vista today(maybe the fifth time since this started happening,rofl) I did all my updates which brought the graphics icon up. I finally clicked on it to find out what it does. XP was a lot easier to deal with.

[Gerien]

Ctrl-alt-arrow down can sometimes reorient it properly.