Ctrl key stuck? with every key press?
I'm using Debian Etch on a laptop with KDE (everything is stable
version unless otherwise noted). I've had problems in the past where
some app would crash, or seg-fault (or possibly some other error would
happen) and as a result, the screen saver wouldn't work, or the
keyboard repeat would stop working, and I'd have to go into kcontrol
to re-enable the keyboard repeat or re-enable the screensaver. This
hasn't happened anymore for quite a few months. I recently intalled
akregator for rss feeds. It seg-faulted once when I was downloading
feeds and it froze up (about 30-40 feeds). After I restarted it, it
worked normally. Shortly thereafter (and it may not be related to
akregator's seg-fault), I couldn't use the keyboard anymore, because
every key press was resulting in a combo key press as if I was holding
down the CTRL key (I wasn't). So I couldn't type in a shell window
(konsole), couldn't type a url in konqueror, couldn't click on the
start button (the K icon on the kicker panel) to start any
applications in the menu, I couldn't start an app via ALT-F2 because I
couldn't type anything in the window, etc. Every keypress was as if I
was holding down the CTRL key during the other keypresses (pressing j
would result in a newline in shell/konsole, pressing the tab button
would change desktops as if it was a CTRL tab press, rotating the
mouse wheel would change font sizing instead of scrolling, etc.).
Anyone have a solution on how to fix this without restarting X (which
is what I had to do after saving/downloading nearly a hundred open
tabs, which wasn't easy considering I couldn't type anything and the
delete key was erasing entire words instead of individual
letters/spaces)? I tried to find a setting in kcontrol that was
related to CTRL always being pressed/activated, or some related
settings in keyboard areas of kcontrol or locality settings, or
shortcuts, etc. I couldn't find any solution.
Any help on this would be really appreciated in case it happens again.
Especially if it is related to akregator seg-faulting, as I finally
joined the crowd and found how useful an rss reader is. I'd like to
continue using it, especially this particular one as it integrates
with kde and uses libraries (and memory) already in use by other kde
apps.
tia for any help,
Di.
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