Spurious space characters from Pocket PC Keyboard (SIP)

I was working with a company last week looking into a really weird issue on a Pocket PC 2003 device: just occasionally when their users login to the app they were seeing random spaces inserted into the user name field (possibly the password as well but the characters were masked) for no apparent reason. The user names are all in the format: user<xxx>. At first I was convinced it was an app or device driver issue, but I tried it out and reproduced the same behaviour in Notes on several other devices and on the emulator without the app installed! So I started to think that maybe its an OS issue until the customer found the answer: the standard keyboard SIP (soft input panel) supports 4 standard gestures that allow a user to place the stylus on a key and move up for <SHIFT> + Key, down for <enter>, left for <backspace> and right for <space>. The Input control panel app shows this quite clearly - shows just how often I've used that! Check it out on the emulator or your device, just click a key and flick the stylus up or right. This was obviously happening between the 'e' and 'r' characters of the user name when typing quickly.

Well, it’s good to see it wasn’t a bug and even better to learn something new about Windows Mobile :)