This could be the problem!
Random words and characters mysteriously appearing on the screens of some
Windows XP and Office XP users are not the work of phantom hackers or a sign
that users' systems are possessed by demons. It's just Microsoft's voice
recognition system running slightly amok, the company said.
In recent weeks, several XP users have posted messages to Internet
discussion lists and newsgroups reporting that text is automatically
appearing in Internet Explorer's address bar or in Outlook e-mail messages
or Word documents as users compose them.
In a posting entitled "My Remote Keyboard is Possessed in XP," for example,
one Microsoft customer reported "very strange behavior" that included
letters appearing in input areas of the screen while browsing and writing
e-mails.
the XP user.
Another Microsoft customer separately reported that "a ghost" appeared to be
taking over his computer. In the message, entitled "Phantom Menace XP," the
user said something was causing toolbars and options to pop up without his
input.
In response to user inquiries, in January Microsoft published a handful of
articles in the Support section of its Web site about the problem.
According to Microsoft, after installing Microsoft's Speech application
programming interface, "random words or characters may be displayed in
Office XP documents or in the Internet Explorer Address bar."
The company said the behavior occurs because "the speech recognition tool is
'listening' to your voice through you computer's microphone and is
attempting to recognize what you are saying."
Microsoft said its speech recognition engine, a program file named
Sapisvr.exe, is turned on at installation by some computer manufacturers.
The engine is also included with Microsoft Office XP and other
speech-enabled products.
To resolve the problem, Microsoft said XP users should disable the Dictation
and the Voice Command features on the operating system's Language bar.
Alternately, users can turn off speech recognition completely from the
Regional and Language Options tool on XP's Control Panel.
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Merely unplugging or turning off the computer's microphone does not correct
the random-character problem, according to several user reports.
Microsoft's article about random characters in Office XP is at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315765 .
Microsoft's article on configuring speech recognition in Windows XP is at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q306537 .
Microsoft's .NET Speech homepage is
http://www.microsoft.com/speech/ .
Reported by Newsbytes,
http://www.newsbytes.com .
GO TO:
Control panel/regional and language options/languages tab, click on
"details".
See if speech is installed here as a service. If so, then click on it, then
on "remove".
