Comment 19 for bug 190934

By coincidence I had a VMWare VM open today when it happened again and I can confirm what Matt said, ie:

- The keyboard worked perfectly in the VM, including the modifiers like shift, etc

- Newly-opened applications were crashing, eg I opened gedit to store the output of xev, and gedit crashed; then apport detected that gedit crashed, but then apport crashed while trying to report that gedit crashed.

This and the previous time this bug occurred occurred, I wasn't getting a series of 'brightness down' events reported in xev - it only registered keyboard events when I actually pressed/released a key.

Since the VM isn't affected by the bug, perhaps this isn't a keyboard driver bug at all? Perhaps Gnome is not passing the events on correctly?

I'd say this bug is critical because:

- it's a bug in a fundamental function of the OS (ie I/O)

- it can cause data loss

- the computer becomes unusable (you have to log out to fix the problem)

- if it's happening regularly in the beta for some people, it's likely to affect many users in the released version, which would be terrible publicity for Ubuntu;

Does anybody have suggestions for what to do to try and debug this next time it happens?