Periodic Keyboard Lag/Delay

On two of my computers running Natty with Gnome 3, I'm having periodic keyboard lag. It happens at a random interval after starting the computer. Basically, the keyboard will stop functioning normally and only register input if you hold a key down for two or more seconds. When you release the key, it stops right away like it should.

The only fix I've found so far is to restart the computer. One computer only experiences this about once a day, and it's not a big deal to restart it. The other computer does it quite frequently, sometimes even within the first few minutes after booting. Last night I had to restart that computer probably five or six times over the course of a few hours.

This started happening about a week ago, and I haven't been able to pinpoint a cause.

Does someone know how to permanently fix this problem?

Solution 1:

I had the same problem with my Lenovo x61 laptop running xubuntu 11.04. After some experimentation I found that this only occurs when using xterm. Try using a different terminal like gnome-terminal or xfce4-terminal.

A good way to test for this problem is to hold down a key in the the terminal (e.g. "aaaaa" ...). After a short while it was evident that xterm was locking up where other terminals were not.

Thanks to Oil for unlocking this question so that I could post my answer for you.

Another user: I had the same problem and finally figured out the root cause. Go to System Configurations -> Universal Access -> Typing, and turn off the Bounce Keys.

Solution 2:

I figured out that using a different window manager helped. Try xfwm4 --replace - do you still experience this?