keyboard shift stopped working - old kernel, vmware

[David Timms]

Scott Robbins wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 07:26:04AM -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 20:58 +1000, David Timms wrote:
>>> I have had an experience where the shift key stops working. It also 
>>> affects the shift lock, and makes it impossible to enter a shifted password.

> I've had this happen sometimes in X.  It's also happened to me in
> FreeBSD.  Another thing I've had happen is for the Mod4 key (the Windows
> key) although being shown in xmodmap, stop working.  
> 
> It hasn't happened to me for awhile though.  I have an xmodmaprc that
> reads
> 
> keycode 115 = Super_L
> add Mod4 = Super_L
> keycode 117 = Multi_key
> keycode 50 = Shift_L
> 
> Sometimes, it seems that running xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc will fix it.  That
> always fixes the Mod4, but doesn't always work with the shift.  
> 
> It's happened on more than one machine for me, but hasn't seemed Fedora
> specific.  Various other flavors of Linux, as well as FreeBSD, would
> also do it. 

This is on a laptop's builtin keyboard.
so next time I should try:
- xev, and
- xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc  next time it happens, or does that file not 
exist by default.

> If I got out of X, the shift key would work again, so I don't think it's
> my keyboard. 
Thanks, for the comments, I dislike being the only one with weird issues.

It happened again today, possible shortly after changing from the vm 
fast switch mode back to the Fedora desktop. The unshiftedness occurs in 
both the vmware winxp guest, and in the Fedora host.
This time I tried logging out and in again {without restarting my vmware 
machine}, and it fixed the shifting for both the host and guest.