etch to lenny upgrade - X apps no longer see keystrokes?

[Graham Williams <Graham.Williams@togaware.com>]

Have just upgraded a fairly vanilla etch install on a Dell Precision
690 (AMD64) with an nvidia graphics chip. All seemed to proceed well,
but on reboot and starting up GDM, most key presses result in the
screen resolution changing - I can't login!

After quite a bit of research and attempts to determine what is going
on, I have run out of ideas! Ctrl-Alt-f1, etc, do not function.  The
simplest way I've figured out to log on is through single user
mode. Keyboard works just fine there. Booting into a Red Hat partition
is also just fine.

I've created a .xinitrc which only runs xev so I can see what keys it
is seeing. When I run with video driver as "nv" (in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf) xev is not seeing any keyboard activity. Changing
to "vga" at least I can see that xev gets the keystrokes (but the
screen is not usable). Changing to "vesa" exhibits the same behaviour
as "nv" - that is, no keys reported by xev, and any key press seems to
change the screen resolution.

With the "nv" driver (xserver-xorg-video-nv) I can seeverything on the
screen. Mouse and menus work.  Ctl-Alt-Backspace works (to terminate
X11). But most other keys simple cause this screen resolution change.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Graham