First of all thanks for you answer and sorry for my late replay.
The laptop with the symptoms developed serious hardware problems.
The CPU was pulled out of the socket at one edge.

On Tue, 8 Feb 2000 22:27:08 +0000 (GMT) David Brownlee <abs@netbsd.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Bernd Salbrechter wrote:
> 
> > Sometimes the last pressed key is repeated as I still press it. It
> > lock like wscons doesn't recognize the release of the key. The
> > autorepeat stops, if I press any key and release it. I have only
> > disabled the green kernel messages in GENERIC, otherwise the wscons
> > options are untouched. I didn't had that phenomena on my 486 tower.
> > 
> > If this is not a known problem, can I activate some kernel traces
> > to find out more about it, or are there other thingth I can do to
> > help you to find it?
> > 
> 	Strange - could you try a kernel with the pccons instead of
> 	wscons console driver to see if it shows up there?

Now I have checked it with a new (1.4.2) kernel and the problem
still exist with wscons and with pccons all is Ok.

With wscons:
  * sometimes keys are autorepeated without holding the key down.
  * the screen update doesn't work correct. Most of this can be
    solved by switching to vt100. A additional detail I recognized,
    is that the last line of the messages from login get overwritten
    by the prompt.

With pccons:
  * Autorepeat works correct (only if the key hold down).
  * I find no problems in the screen update.

About the other problems
  * PCMCIA Ethernet cars (ne)
  * screen update in wscons (more)
I have already post an answer, if it got lost I can resend it.

Hope that helps
Bernd Salbrechter

PS.: As already sayed, I can do some debugging, if someone point me
to the right sources.