Subject: Re: Windows makes Emacs choke on and swallow the WIN keys

From: Raffael Stocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 15:26:21 +0200

Raffael Stocker <[email-masked]> writes:

> this is a weird one (and long, apologies).  On MS Windows, it sometimes
> happens that a windows key gets stuck, that is, it remains (logically)
> pressed down, and this behaviour is correlated with Emacs use.  A
> colleague and I are seeing this on two installations with Emacs 28.2 and
> 29.2 on Windows 10 and 11.  Unfortunately, this is somewhat random and
> we have not found a way to trigger it directly.
> [...]
> We have had good results with increasing the ‘LowLevelHooksTimeout’, but
> we had to set it to the maximum value of 1000 ms.  I am not sure about
> the default value; the internet claims it to be 200 ms.

I believe I can now provide an update here.  The last few (2...3) months
we have been running Emacs 30 on two machines, with
‘LowLevelHooksTimeout’ set to 10 (to more easily trigger this bug).  In
this time, we have not seen the bug at all.

To confirm that this is connected to the Emacs version we were running,
my colleague has now used Emacs 29.2 for a couple of days.  And lo and
behold, on the second day, the bug re-surfaced: she pressed the windows
key in Emacs, then changed to some other program and there it was.

So, it seems we can be reasonably confident that something in Emacs 30
fixed this bug.  Perhaps it was the WTS_SESSION fix after all (although
then I don't understand how), or it was something else.

I don't know whether this qualifies as good enough to close this issue,
but I suspect we might not be seeing this bug again.

Regards,
Raffael