I am experiencing a weird problem with my keyboard. This morning when I logged on, my keyboard seemed to have gone completely dead. In fact, it is still alive - no input is generated on ordinary key presses, but if I press and hold a key, I get the normal repetition of that key. This problem only affects my ordinary user. When I log in as root, everything is normal. I have checked the desktop settings for the keyboard - they don't seem to have changed.

I am running KDE 4.1.3 (release 4:10.4) on OpenSUSE 11.1. The keyboard is a Logitech Cordless Desktop MX3000 (the cordless mouse, which connects through the same unit works perfectly).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Have you set any keyboard layouts? Also, the keyboard repeat rate may have been changed. This can be configured in System Settings > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard.

Thanks for Your swift reply.

The keyboard layout is danish with no dead keys - that has not been changed. The repeat rate doesn't seem to have changed either (in truth, I have no idea what it used to be, but the setting for my regular user is the same as for root, and the keyboard works perfectly when I log in as root).

Everything worked fine yesterday, and I didn't make any desktop settings before shutting down, so I am completely in the dark here.

Does making some change then clicking apply ( you can just click up then down in the repeat rate spinner for instance ) fix the keyboard? Is a new user affected?

Thanks a lot for your help. I now have a solution to my problem - sort of.

Making changes to the keyboard settings and applying them had no effect on the keyboard situation. The new user is not affected by the problem, so I guess, that does not help pinpointing the problem. At least, now I can move everything to the new user and continue working.

It would be nice to know the cause of this snafu, however, so if you have any suggestions, I would love to try them out.

Check if "slow keys" is enabled in systemsettings>accessibility>keyboard filters, disable it and try again.

Great! That did the trick. How that option ever came to be enabled I shall never know.

Thank You very much.

It's activated by gestures, by default pressing Shift for 8 seconds, but it does display a pop-up window indicating that slow keys/accessibility features are activated.... so may be you held Shift for 8 seconds then pressed Enter or Space and didn't notice. You may want to uncheck "use gestures for activating slow...." too on the "Activation Gestures" tab (sticky keys are enabled if you press Shift 5 successive times).

That must be it. Thanks for the advice.