Losing keystrokes in windows 8.1 with browser open

I'm having a couple weird problems with loss of keystrokes in windows 8.1. Not sure if it's a driver or malware issue.

Right after I installed windows 8.1 I noticed that if a browser window is open, i lose keystrokes in any application. This happens with both Chrome and I.E.

And the keystrokes that are lost can be in any random edit control, notepad, typing keys into google search, photoshop etc.

And in fact, it's particularly annoying in photoshop because many of photoshop's tools and menus are invoked using alt | shift | ctrl sequences. What often happens is that I use a modifier key such as alt and the keystroke interruption occurs and windows never notices that I've taken my finger off the alt key so after that, every keystroke is interpreted as an alt-key sequence until I notice it and re-toggle the alt key.

Note, this only happens when a browser window is open and even though it made no sense, I swapped keyboards, lol. Problem still occurs.

I tried uninstalling crashplan and AVG (currently using windows defender).

I have disabled google-now and all notifications from facebook, etc.

The reason I know the keystroke loss is from facebook or email messages is that when I had the original problem, it was always accompanied by the audio "Ding" that windows 8.1 gives you when a message comes in. I since disabled audio for windows events but it's not actually the audio causing the problem.

I was not having this problem prior to installing windows 8.1.

The computer is an i7-3820 with 32gb memory, 256gb ssd, 2tb secondary drive running 64 bit.

I have run full scans with AVG, Defender and Malware bytes.

I'm going to try runing a root kit scanner today. What would you recommend my next steps?

I'm considering just formatting the whole thing and going back to windows 7 pro...

Any thoughts would be appreciated...

 

what could it be? Odd that others are not reporting the same thing and it only happens when a browser window is open and a message comes in so it's not hardware related. If it was a windows 8 bug it'd be all over the internet.

Maybe not malware but seems like something happing at a very low level (beneath the windows keyboard services) layer.

Any thoughts what it might be if not malware?