odd X errors

[Peter Rooney <peterrooney@telus.net>]

Dear folk,

My keyboard is doing something odd in X that it is not doing in the tty 
consoles.

When I press the regular '=' key (not the keypad '=' key), what comes 
out in gnome-term, mozilla, etc. is '9='.  When I hit '+', what comes 
out is '(+'.  The extra unwanted characters can (thankfully) be deleted, 
so it's clearly not some arcane unicode glyph.

I figured I'd try 'showkey' to see what's going on, but from the various 
X terms, it  bails with the error message 'Couldnt get a file descriptor 
referring to the console'.

I have yet to find any documentation that suggests that, for regular 
characters, X uses any file other than `/etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz'.
zless shows nothing obviously unusual in the file.  I've also grepped 
and zgrepped through every file in my system (well, except /dev/* and 
proc/*) and found a whole bunch of ISO-nnnn-99=foo matches.

I'm not familiar enough with X to figure out what I should be googling 
for.  What -should- I be looking for?

Peter Rooney