login and terminal character recognition

[mdevin@ozemail.com.au]

I have just installed debian potato again and now I seem to have a
problem with logging in.  When I reboot the system and then try to log
in on a virtual terminal as root it refuses telling me "login
incorrect".  When I log in as a user and then log out and then log back
in as root it works fine.

Now I know this has something to do with the virtual terminal not
recognising the keys properly when I type them.  It must be that the
word "root" doesn't have enough characters for the terminal to detect
what type it should be emulating? or something?????  When I type in my
username to login which has more chars, then it obviously gets enough
characters to figure out how it should initialise itself?????

Obviously, I don't know quite enough about all this terminal stuff to be
able to fix it.  Is there some package that I am missing which gets run
before login to initialise the terminal?  How do I tell it what it is so
that it recognises the keys I type when I try to login as root?  Has it
got something to do with keymaps?

Thanks for any hints.
Mark.