Cursor becomes a question mark and prevents input

I first entered this in the Mini forum, then realized it had to be a software issue.
My cursor arrow changes to a question mark. Odd things are happening. In Firefox and PhotoShop, numerous "Help" windows open. If I try to shut them, I just get more. I have to Force Quit. In Mail, I can't type more than a couple of characters on the keyboard. This is true in some other apps as well.
What on earth is going on? Safari does not call up help windows on its own—just for PS, but I can only occasionally click on anything or enter a character. I can cut and paste info into boxes...a ridiculous way to work!
I have to use my laptop to ask for some real help with my Mini, as I can't type anything in "Help" either!
I don't know that the problem began with Mail, but I was sending an e-mail response when it lost half the message and did not complete the send process. That has never happened before, but I don't know if that was cause or symptom. Did I accidentally strike some weird combination of keys?
I can type in AppleWorks 6 and Word. This must mean that it isn't a faulty keyboard. The keyboard and mouse I'm using are my old wired ones from my g4 dual 500. I've never had a problem with either.

OK, I booted up in Safe Mode. I ran Disk Utility and repaired permissions. I was able to type in Mail, use Safari and make a stickie not with the info on the permissions. Unfortunately, the "?" began appearing after a fairly short while. It first cropped up in Safari. I had closed the other apps. Stickies can't be used. Mail is non-responsive to keyboard. It sometimes responds if I click the mouse in the finder, then back in mail...for 1 action.
OK, having "looked at" all the suggested places and compared them to the same places on my powerbook, they don't seem to be set up quite the same, e.g., the mbp has considerably more items in the System Library Startup Items folder. Since I don't know what I'm looking for, this seemed a fruitless exercise. Nothing jumped out at me. Even if I did know what all the acronyms stand for, I wouldn't have the foggiest notion if they were as they were supposed to be.
I tried using Find to locate any invisible files created this week that were less than 800 KB in size, as I'd read somewhere that there was a virus that fit that description. I let it run all night. If it was working, nothing turned up.
Any other ideas?
bummer...sure would be nice if I knew what to look for...feels like snark-hunting, you know...

Similar Messages

  • Cursor becomes a question mark

    I cannot find any similar questions.
    My cursor arrow changes to a question mark. Odd things happen then. In Firefox, numerous "Help" windows open. If I try to shut them, I just get more. I have to Force Quie. In Mail, I can't type more than a couple of characters on the keyboard. This is true in some other apps as well. In Word, I can type. This must mean that it isn't a faulty keyboard.
    What on earth is going on?
    I'm using my laptop to ask for some real help with my Mini, as I can't type anything in "Help" either!

    Has this problem been going on for several reboots or days, or is it a first-time occurrence?
    What kind of mouse and keyboard do you have? Are they wired or wireless?
    I see from your first forum post that you had problems with AppleWorks crashing, possibly due to your keyboard layout selection. Did you resolve that issue? If so, how?

  • Terminal input becomes a question mark

    Everyone's entitled to post a stoopid question - Here's mine:
    This happened once before:
    I hit a key on my 101 keyboard and the Terminals cursor changed to a "?"
    I have restarted the Terminal app and even logged in an out (with Remote Desktop) and any character I type is converted to a "?".
    I can't remember how I got out of it before... short of rebooting - which seems to be a bit much...
    Anyone got a clue?

    Hi Tim,
       I apologize; it's difficult to tell if a person is a newbie from one post and I've found it efficient to err on the side of newbieness. Also, when you said
    > any character I type is converted to a "?"
    I thought you were saying that the character echoed back was a question mark. As Joe says, that is rather common. It simply didn't occur to me that the cursor itself would become a question mark. I apologize I didn't know what the help key did.
       I can search though and I found the following in TextMate Blog » Key bindings for switchers:if you click the Help key, the mouse pointer turns into a question mark, and now the next mouse click is “special” in that it requests help for the clicked item.Thus, the "help" keystroke should be trapped by the local machine and it is supposed to interpret the next mouse click as a request for help.
       You didn't mention Remote Desktop before. The GUI part of that is VNC under the hood and Apple didn't write the protocol. I can't say that I'm surprised that there's a bug in such platform specific behavior.
       Now that we have some idea of the complexity of what you're doing, it's clear that we can't know exactly what is happening. However, I don't think that the help "feature" would be handled by the terminal application. I would guess that it's handled at a lower level and would expect it to be handled by the client OS. Thus I'm naturally surprised that this effects your server but maybe for some unknown reason VNC transmits the "help" keystroke and your server's GUI is waiting for a mouse click that it isn't getting. Maybe you could plug a USB mouse into the box and click on something. If you hit the help key again, you might as well try all you can in search of a workaround.
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    ~~~~
       * joeyh wonders why everyone wants to know how tall he is
       <james> joeyh: it helps the sniper

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