This really sounds like the touchpad issue. It's pretty common for the palm of your hand near the thumb to brush against the touchpad as you type, especially when reaching for keys such as B or H. The cursor then jumps to wherever the mouse pointer is positioned. The next few times this happens, take note of the position of the mouse pointer. Is it near where your misplaced text starts appearing? If so, then you are inadvertantly activating the touchpad.

You wouldn't see the mouse pointer moving, because the momentary contact only counts as a "tap" - like clicking the mouse button. It doesn't ususally move the pointer's position.

The driver for my Dell touchpad has a setting called "Palm Check" that is designed to deal with this. It does, but with mixed results. Set too low, it does nothing, and set too high, it makes using the touchpad difficult. But you might want to check if your version of the touchpad driver has this, and if you aren't using the touchpad anyway, you can set it to the highest value. It's possible this value got reset to a lower value when you reformatted your machine. It's also possible that you had "tapping" the touchpad as a substitute for clicking the mouse button turned off, but now it's back on.

• Jimdoria  ~@>@