Virtual PC: Keyboard stops working intermittently ?

I’ve been working with Virtual PC 2004 for a while now, I’m spending almost all of my development/testing time inside various Virtual PC images so I can protect my physical PC from being cluttered up with all the technologies, code, etc. that I end up having to use.

However I’ve been fighting an annoying intermittent keyboard problem where the keyboard stops working inside the Virtual PC OS, Eventually I’ve figured out why it stops working. If you use Right Alt+Enter to make toggle Full Screen it triggers the keyboard to stop working. It turns out that the CTRL key is being “stuck down” inside the Virtual PC meaning the keyboard looks like it’s not responding.

You can prove this by pressing ESC, which brings up the Start Menu, you can clear the “stuck key” by pressing CTRL again inside the VPC, Annoying but at least gets you working again. Seems to affect all Host/Guest OS and hardware combinations so far