@sgunhouse Your suggestion of holding it down works and I had no idea about the default windows function which you even mentioned in the above posts, my apologies for not reading your comments properly, and thank you for the prompt response, I appreciate it.

@sgunhouse Sorry if it's against the rules to reply to old posts like this but I am still having this problem, is there really no way to disable the "alt" key dropping down the left menu? I can confirm that when I press alt+r to bring up NVIDIA performance overlay, I also have this problem when I'm browsing opera, it is quite inconvenient.
If I do hit them both perfectly in sync then it doesn't happen but this isn't consistent and sometimes there is a slight lag in between pressing the keys which results in this inconvenience, is there no way to change the shortcut of this menu dropdown or disable it entirely?