Touchscreen not working? Obscure WIN10 setting

OK, for background: My touchscreen I use for Helios just stopped working recently. Monitor seems fine, all tests and checks say it should be working, but Windows 10 just isn't seeing the touch input at all. Went through all the support websites out there, did all the things, no good. It was past time for me to upgrade to a better touchscreen anyway, so I did, and that eliminated the "your monitor is broken" conclusion all the support sites gave me.

Come to find out, there is a registry entry, that is not "native" to Windows (unless it's been added in a recent patch I don't know about) that turns off windows accepting touch input. It won't come up in the normal searches for the problem, I stumbled upon it on a tablet site, in reference to a different issue. So, I thought I'd pass it along here, and maybe save someone going through all the aggravation that I just did.

It seems this sometimes gets added to Windows by 3rd party software, usually a mouse or keyboard driver package, or OEM on some Windows tablets, that is designed to be used to turn off touch input if the touch screen is acting up, or otherwise interfering with the mouse or keyboard. In my case, it was there, and it was set to "disabled" so Windows happily ignored my touch input, and just as happily reported that nothing was wrong when I ran through the tests. I recently added a new gaming mouse, and suspect it's the culprit.

***WARNING***

If you do not know how to edit the registry, do not apply this fix yourself. If you do not know what you are doing, you can really mess up your computer by messing with things in the registry, and will have to re-install Windows from scratch to fix it. Any registry edits are at your own risk.

The entry you are looking for is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch

Look for a line called Touchgate with a value of either 0 or 1. 0 is "disabled" which blocks touch input, and 1 is "enabled" which allows touch input. It's as simple as changing the value.

So, if your touchscreen just ups and stops registering touch input, and especially if it's after adding a new mouse or keyboard, check there first, it might save you a lot of time and trouble. I don't recommend removing the line, (though in theory it should work) as it will likely just get re-installed in the registry the next time the device that put it there updates, or by another peripheral you may add in the future.

Great find, thank you for sharing! If this crops up a lot in the future, we could put a test in Helios that checks if this is set and lets the user know.