Windows key suddenly dies (FC4)

[Øyvind Stegard]

Hi,

I've been having a problem lately where my left Windows key suddenly 
dies on me and stops generating keyboard events. This is extremely 
annoying as I use it as a modifier for many shortcuts to apps, desktop 
switching and window management. It seems to happen randomly, and I have 
to totally power off/on my laptop to get it working again. Sometimes, 
though, it randomly starts working again. I see no patterns, nor any 
offending X apps. Tried killing wm [Metacity], does not help. The 
problem is perhaps all the way into the kernel, since the 'showkey' 
command shows no generated events when I press it (same when X isn't 
running). Nothing about unknown keys in dmesg, either. xev shows 
nothing. This has never happened with Linux on this laptop before, and 
I've been using Fedora on it since FC2. The key in itself is certainly 
not broken, physically.

Some (hopefully) relevant info:
* I'm using Norwegian keyboard layout (no) on a Compaq Presario laptop.
* Using Gnome
* kernel-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4
* xorg-x11-6.8.2-37
* gcc-4.0.1-3.fc4

The latest "big" system update was gcc (and thus libgcc, libstdc++, 
...), and I cannot recall it happening before this. I'd greatly 
appreciate if anyone knew something about this or could point me into 
bugzilla (have searched, but too many "Zarro Boogs found" gets old 
really quickly >8[ ).

Øyvind.
-- 
< Øyvind Stegard < oyvinst at ifi uio no >
  < http://www.oyvind.nu/
   < `Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.'