OK, so whose bright idea was it to put the F12 key so close to the Delete key on the keyboard? And whose bright idea was it to map F12 to "Save As..." in every MS Office application? And, whose bright idea was it to default the Save As... option to the users home directory, even if that directory is redirected to a network share, and it will take up to 30 seconds to list that directory, with the net result that every time you fat-finger the Delete key the computer hangs for 30 seconds while it tries to list the home directory so you can Save As... a document that you don't want to save as?

Maybe it is Vista that is sluggish in figuring out whether offline files are really available or not, but I roam with my laptop all the time. Much of the time I am on a network where my home directory is not available. Yet, Vista/Office 12 tries to list my home directory each time I fatfinger the Delete key. Each time it takes between 5 and 30 seconds for me to get control back of my computer. I got tired of it, so I used the information in this article about the Scan Code Mapper to disable the F12 key altogether. Even my dog could count on one hand (yes, I know dogs don't have hands; that's the point) the number of times in 14 years of using Windows that I have used the F12 key on purpose. I figure I probably won't miss it.

If you want to do the same, run this command from an elevated command prompt:

reg add "hklm\system\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" /v "Scancode Map" /t REG_BINARY /d 0000000000000000020000000000580000000000

Then reboot. If you want to undo the operation, run this command:

reg delete "hklm\system\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" /v "Scancode Map" /f

And then reboot.

If you want to remap other keyboard keys you can do so using the same key. You just modify the binary value that I entered to include additional mappings. The syntax for the Scancode Map key is in the article I linked earlier. The actual key codes you need are in this Word doc: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/input/Scancode.mspx.

Read the complete post at http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2007/05/04/i-ve-hit-f12-for-the-last-time.aspx