Comment 4 for bug 190934

I had just completed writing up this thing, and then my 'alt' key got stuck and rendered me unable to post, or even save, my writeup.... grr.

I've also been having severe keyboard breakage under Hardy. Initially I used evdev for my keyboard, but then I started having the issue where, almost every single time I used a compiz [-fusion] feature bound to my 'super' key, the modifier would become stuck and render my desktop literally useless; I'd have to alt-sysrq-k to kill Xorg.

Once I changed back to using the kbd driver, the behavior changed: now I no longer get 'super' stuck down as often, but I have had keys either become stuck or just stop working. In addition, keyboard repeat will break at the same time.

When the keyboard breaks, modifer key behavior becomes very odd -- for example, I'll press ctrl-c-c-c in console without releasing the ctrl key, and I'll get c-c-<break> (break is ctrl-c, of course). In addition, I can press ctrl-alt-backspace in xev, and the window will receive the terminate_server keycode that Xorg itself should be intercepting.

One easy way to trigger the bug seems to be through scrolling: go to a long page such as this one, and repeatedly use (hold) pgup and pgdn to scroll around on a page. This will often result in the key becoming 'stuck'. In addition, I can sometimes un-trigger the bug in a similar way: hold the key while also scrolling with the mouse.
http://connect.creativelabs.com/linux/Lists/Driver Issues/AllItems.aspx

The oddest behavior I have seen with keyboard occured one time when 'ctrl' became stuck, and then I used alt-sysrq-r to ubreak the keyboard, and xkbcomp to reload my keymap. This placed Xorg in an odd state: most keyboard actions, such as ctrl-w in Firefox, worked fine; however, any mouse actions acted as if the ctrl key was still held down.

I'd like to suggest marking this bug as 'high' probability, because if you happen to get shift-super stuck down in xorg, it will become difficult, if not literally impossible, to save work before killing Xorg. In fact, even just the 'alt' key can break saving contents of forms such as these, since there will be no way to open anything to paste the text into.