Frequently an error message appears advising that “KBD.EXE has encountered a problem and needs to close”. I can close the error message and the computer appears to continue working correctly, but the message is quite irritating. How can I stop this error message from appearing? The computer is running Windows XP.

KBD.EXE is a process used on computers to control special keys on multimedia keyboards. For example, if you have keyboard with buttons for email, internet, etc then the KBD.EXE is used to interpret these special keys and then perform the required action (e.g. opening Internet Explorer, opening Outlook). Since this program is crashing and you report that the computer continues to work correctly it seems that you are not using these special keys anyway, so you are not losing any functionality by not having this process operational. We can stop the error message appearing by disabling the KBD.EXE process from loading on Windows startup. Go to the “Start” menu > “Run” and type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and click OK. In the System Configuration Utility that appears, click the “Startup” tab. This will list all the processes which load on Windows startup. Find the entry for “KBD.EXE” and untick the entry, which will disable the process from loading on startup. Click OK and restart the computer. When the computer restarts the KBD.EXE process will not load and you should no longer receive the error message. Be aware when you restart, a message may appear advising that the computer is running in Selective Startup Mode. This means that not all processes are loading on startup. The reason this occurs is that we disabled a process from loading on startup, and not all processes are loading on startup anymore. You can safely tick the box not to show this message again and then close the message.

However, in the future if you need to use the special keys on your keyboard, I suggest that you visit the website for the manufacturer of your keyboard or computer to download updated drivers which do not cause this error.