keyboard failure that doesn't seem to be hardware

[Paul Allen Newell]

Hello:

I am doing my first F17 install on i686 Xfce and, for the most part, 
everything is coming up nicely. However, I am noticing that sometimes 
the keyboard becomes unresponsive. I can't seem to find a reason, it 
just happens. My first sense was that it was a hardware problem.

However, one time I decided to let the session time out so that when I 
had moved the mouse, I got the "re-enter passwd" dialog box to get back 
to my session. As could be expected, I couldn't type my password in. So 
I tried selecting new user login and, lo and behold, if I clicked on 
myself, it let me enter a password. However, it then immediately went 
back to the "re-enter passwd" from the session time out and the keyboard 
was dead.

Net result is I find it hard to believe that the hardware is the 
problem. But I can't figure out what would be locking up the keyboard so 
that it would appear dead. I also note that I had multiple windows open 
plus firefox and the keyboard wouldn't work in any of them, so it isn't 
shell based. One time I ran a tail of /var/log/messages and nothing 
showed up in it once the keyboard died and it did give me other standard 
messages when I waited about a half hour to new messages to be flushed 
to the file.

Any ideas about where to start? Everything I spotted online didn't seem 
to relate ... and I am having a hard time figuring out what a good set 
of search terms for this problem is.

Thanks in advance,
Paul