Strange keyboard/mouse behaviour

[Giles Orr]

2009/1/19 Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org>:
> I've never ever come across this one before.
>
> Since upgrading to Kubuntu 8.10 (and using the nVidea binary driver that
> comes with it), I've been having some very strange things happen to the
> input systems;
>
> - If I press the shift key to type something, sometimes, the shift is sticky
> (as if I pressed caps-lock); sometimes I need to repeatedly press the
> caps-lock key (or sometimes the shift key) to 'unstick' things. This is not
> consistent repeatable, sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.
>
> - Sometimes when I want to highlight a line of something (a specific email
> in Thunderbird, a file in Dolphin, etc.) when I click on a file it
> highlights multiple entries even though I only clicked one line. It's as if
> I'm pressing shift-click even though I'm not pressing anything on the
> keyboard.
>
> Obviously the two are related; the input is reporting that I'm pressing
> shift when I'm not.
>
> I've tried different keyboard layouts without any effect. Is this something
> in software, or is my keyboard (a very good 15 year old Fujitsu model with a
> tactile feedback I can't easily find anymore) starting to die on me?
>
> I'm right now disinclined to think hardware failure because things were
> working fine before the upgrade. I just don't know where to start diagnosing
> this. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Sorry I can't address this quite as directly as you'd hoped, but
here's my suggestion (freely given and worth every penny):

While the timing is suspicious, it _does_sound like hardware failure.
I would suggest eliminating hardware failure as a possibility first.
With the machine off, plug in a different keyboard and mouse (unplug
the old ones).  Use these for a while and see what happens.  If you
continue to have stuff sticking, you can say for sure the problem
_isn't_ hardware.

Others may have better ideas.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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