Hi everyone!

I have a dell studio 15 notebook, ati radeon mobility 3400 card, with opensuse 11.1, and KDE 4.3 (Factory). However, this problem has been around since I started using the 4.1 or 4.2 stable releases.

After working for a while (typically one to a few hours), the keyboard does not work anymore, except for changing to text-mode sessions
(Ctrl-Alt-F1/F2/.../F6), where I can log in and reset the computer.

While the keyboard doesn't work, I still use the mouse and grab/move windows, resize them, minimize, maximize, but anything inside the decoration cannot be clicked. I can also click the main menu and things in the task manager, even get context menus.
The only way I have been able to recover is to reset the computer, so this is a highly annoying problem.

I don't use compositing, and both sticky and slow keys options are disabled.
It is possible that this happens when pressing alt-tab, but I cannot confirm it. What could it be?

Thanks a lot.

I have no idea what causes the problem, but (for me and a couple of others) it goes away after going to:

System Settings -> Accessibility -> Modifier Keys

And enable and again disable the sticky keys. It reinitializes the keyboard system or something.

Hope it helps.

Thanks for your suggestion. I just tried it, will post results.
Just to be sure, do you just enable and then disable (applying changes, of course) within the same session, or do you logout between them?

ivan wrote:I have no idea what causes the problem, but (for me and a couple of others) it goes away after going to:

System Settings -> Accessibility -> Modifier Keys

And enable and again disable the sticky keys. It reinitializes the keyboard system or something.

Hope it helps.

Same session, that is, even without exiting the configuration dialogue. For me, it usually works even without applying the changes twice - just have to click twice the aforementioned checkbox, and then Apply.

Excellent. I did that yesterday and until now it's working ok.
Usually I would have had a lock up to this time.
Of course it doesn't mean it will not happen again, but it's going well.
Thanks again!

You're welcome. If it happens again, you know the drill

Well, it has happened twice again.
I tried doing a trick I found somewhere (I can't recall where): clicking simultaneously the left Alt-key and the left (or it was right?) mouse button. The first time it worked, surprisingly.
The second time it didn't, sadly, so after trying multiple keys, tricks, killing processes, etc, I had to hard-reboot. At least this time I was able to click inside the windows.

I still can't find a hint on what could be causing this, excepting for the fact that this is a Dell 1535 notebook, which has a bug in the bios that makes the multimedia button to eject discs to lock on boot (I haven't applied the patch) for a few minutes (and it locks the other multimedia buttons, but nothing else), but I have never had any evidence for a temporal correlation of behaviour there. I don't have similar problems in Vista (I have double boot).
What could be related is a problem I scarcely get in Gnome, that sometimes I lose focus of everything in the whole desktop system, and have to press alt-tab to refocus on anything at all.
I also discovered that since I have installed Dropbox with Nautilus support, if I kill plasma I get the Gnome desktop (in the sense of wallpaper + desktop icons). Maybe not surprising but I wonder if that could be somehow "stealing focus" during a KDE session (sounds imprecise, but I'm no expert in the matter).
I will try killing Nautilus if I get the KDE keyboard lock again. Unfortunately I can't remember if I had the problem before installing Dropbox, and then Gnome.

Ensure that you have deactivated any Accessibility features, as you may be unintentionally activating them. They can be controlled through System Settings > Accessibility.

Thanks a lot.
Due to a series of other problems, I got rid of Opensuse and I'm giving Linux Mint 8 a try. The problem is that I've only been able to use Gnome, since cannot log in in KDE; I'll start a new thread if I can't find a solution in the threads. If I have the locking problem again, I'll be back here.
Thanks a lot for your support!