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"shutting off" broken keys in X



hey all,

so this is a rather odd situation.  a little background:

about 8 months ago, some unknown party spilled some kind of liquid on
my laptop keyboard.  the liquid didn't make it any deeper than the
contact sheet that is under the keys, so all the guts of the system
were ok.  however, the system refused to boot up because of the keyboard,
so i took the entire thing apart and spent about 2 days with a box of
qtips and a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and got the machine booting up,
with the only hitch being that the 'a' and 's' keys were broken.  i
found the directory that had all the keymaps for x11
(/etc/X11/xkb/symbols/), and made my own custom setup that mapped left
shift to 's' and caps lock to 'a'.  all was fine until about a week and
a half ago, when...

out of the blue, the bios started complaining about a 'stuck key' error
at boot time (the key being 'a'), and periodically when i hit certain
other keys i get showered with 'a' and 'A's.  i've taken out the original
entries for 'a' from the keymap file, but it doesn't help, and the
'a's are still a-comin'.  so, what i'm wondering is:  is there any way
to completely turn off/No-op the key in question, so that X just won't
pay any attention to it at all?

any help would be greatly appreciated
--sean

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