I haven't been able to figure out why, but occasionally (maybe about 1/5 of the time?) Dolphin won't recognise any keyboard inputs at all once in-game. For example, pressing ESC, or SHIFT+F1, or the pause key will just not do anything. The only way to exit a game is to press ALT+F4 which then prompts the 'do you want to stop emulation' confirmation box. I've tried enabling hotkeys when Dolphin isn't the active window and also 'always on top' mode but neither have fixed it.
What's even stranger is that this will happen inconsitently within the same Dolphin instance; for example, testing out just now I loaded up Skies of Arcadia which recognised keyboard inputs, pressed ESC and quit, loaded MGS: Twin Snakes which didn't recognise anything, tried ALT+TABbing out and in and stopped with ALT+F4, then reloaded the same game and it recognised inputs just fine!
(in case it's relevant, my specs:
Win 10 Home x64
i5 2500k
MSi GTX 970
16gb DDR3 RAM)
What's even stranger is that this will happen inconsitently within the same Dolphin instance; for example, testing out just now I loaded up Skies of Arcadia which recognised keyboard inputs, pressed ESC and quit, loaded MGS: Twin Snakes which didn't recognise anything, tried ALT+TABbing out and in and stopped with ALT+F4, then reloaded the same game and it recognised inputs just fine!
(in case it's relevant, my specs:
Win 10 Home x64
i5 2500k
MSi GTX 970
16gb DDR3 RAM)