I've noticed this too, and I've also found your thread on the NVIDIA forums.
An easy free solution, depending on what you intend to assign the hotkey to, is to use Autohotkey's function called ControlSend. Using Autohotkey you can capture the key combination and ControlSend can override it's current functionality and send it to a specific application or window, instead of NVIDIA's application.
The basic syntax would be similar to this:
^!h::
ControlSend, ahk_parent, ^!h, ahk_class CLASS_GOES_HERE
return
The Window Spy utility that comes with Autohotkey can tell you the window class if you simply hover over the window while it's running. Replace the class CLASS_GOES_HERE
with the class given to you by Window Spy.
Since NVIDIA doesn't have an apparent way to unmap the key combination, overriding seems to be the easiest free solution available.
For another easy, but not free solution, there is Hotkey Commander. It is shareware (15 days free trial, $15 to buy) and allows you to add, reset, and remove hotkeys implemented by other applications:
I have not tested on AMD/ATI graphics, but I know for a fact that all Intel drivers do this and some Nvidia drivers.
Simply go in to the configuration tool of your driver and look under a section called hotkeys and disable it.
For Intel:
Best Answer
I was having the same problem, and a little research led me to the “Modifying the hot key setting in VMware Server (1008036)” article on the VMware Knowledge Base site (archived here).
It shows how to modify the
preferences.ini
file to make the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+Shift, and indicates that other key combinations can also be set. Ctrl+Alt+Shift was fine for me, so I tried that and it works:Reportedly, the
pref.hotkey.gui
line refers to the Windows key.