If we ever happen to get into this state again, is there anything we could do that would help the developers? I wouldn’t imagine that the Keyman diagnostics or even a ProcMon log would really help… Some sort of debug build of Keyman?
Anyway, let’s hope that it was some sort of gamma ray or gremlin that has now been effectively eliminated.
Thanks for your help, Marc!
It depends on the situation – sometimes a debug log helps, often diagnostic report gives us the clue we need; in this case, reading between the lines of a procmon trace confirmed Eberhard’s suggestion.
@Marc Unfortunately, the behavior has returned. At some point (after the re-installation of ESET) there was some sort of ESET notification about enabling safe banking in my broswers. I agreed to that, and I started having the same problems as before - if my Keyman is running in the background, then my browsers all hang. If I close Keyman, then after almost a minute, they come back to life. I’m doing some testing now in ESET to see what I need to turn off in ESET to make things work again.
OK, I have narrowed down what I need to turn off in ESET to get things to work again. In the Security Tools, these settings seem to allow me to continue working in my browsers with Keyman activated:
As soon as the “Secure all browsers” option is activated, browsers hang with Keyman activated. (There is somewhat of an interaction between that option and the “Safe Banking & Browsing” option. Sometimes turning one on/off also turns the other on/off.)
Kind of a shame to not have browser security… And why is there this weird interaction with Keyman anyway? If I activate “Secure all browsers”, all my browsers hang… until I deactivate Keyman, and then they all come back to life.
So it’s impossible to say exactly what ESET is doing here but from your earlier logs it looked like it was repeatedly scanning the Keyman keyhook library and so it really does look like a bug in ESET, and not anything we can help with from the Keyman side of things.
Keyman looks very much like a keylogger to security software, because it does of course interact directly with the keyboard in every app. You could try contacting their tech support with this issue – we’d be happy to provide technical data to them if that is helpful.
I wanted to provide an update on the resolution to this problem. (Thanks, @Marc, for unlocking the thread again… 
You can lock it again, if you like. Also, thanks to you and @Ross for following up on this issue with me.)
I contact ESET about the problem ( Contact Customer Care | ESET ), and being in central Africa they connected me with a support person in Kenya. We had a remote session where he confirmed the problem on my computer and collected some log data to analyze. I believe he installed Keyman on a test system and confirmed the problem as well, then sent the problem on to the developers.
After a little over a week, they came back to me and requested that I connect to the ESET pre-release channel to confirm that their fix worked. Before I did that, I wanted to make sure that the problem was still there, so I activated the “Secure all browsers” option, the one that caused the problem as described in previous posts, and was quite surprised to find that the problem was already resolved! Of course, ESET does minor updates all the time in the background, so I assume that one of those updates actually contained the fix that they wanted me to get in the pre-release version. Here is the version that I had which seemed to contain the fix:
The tech in Kenya couldn’t tell me exactly which updated module fixed the problem, but among the modules that have been updated in the past week:
I assume it was some change in the Detection Engine that actually fixed the problem. The tech said that he tested the pre-release version with Keyman and didn’t have any problems. Since my system is already unblocked, I didn’t bother shifting to the pre-release channel, but trust that when that version gets released, the problem will still be resolved.
I was fairly impressed with the customer support and quick turn-around that ESET provided. Of course I did also mention that there are many people around the world, especially in minority language groups, who use Keyman, and that it would be easy for them to shift to another anti-virus tool if ESET doesn’t work with the Keyman software that they need for their work and activities…
Thanks for the update – that does sound like great customer service on ESET’s part! 
