It might not be a keyboard problem...

When you type commands, even though the _display_ is munged, what happens
when you hit the return key?  E.g., if you type ``ls -l /'', no matter
what you see when you type it?  (To be sure of things, hit the return key
before starting the new command...)

The reason that I ask is that when I exit X, I tend to (sometimes) get the
some noise stuck in the keyboard input queue.  I haven't seen this in a
while, but as I recall, the noise also echos to the screen.  That in turn
could cause a display problem if the noise happens to include the
control-I (``shift in'') ASCII code.  It affects output display, but not
input handling.  (To fix it, then, you need only do get a control-O (shift
out) character sent to the console.)

So, hit return once to use up whatever's in the input queue, and type a
command (like ls -l /) that produces enough output to tell whether the
system is correctly reading ``ls -l /'', or something else.


(I assume, from what you say about the screen being ``in "weird mode"''
that you can't read any output that the computer gives after that point.)


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu