Now thinking about my X prob from the other evening, I don't think the
getty was the problem (though of course I could be wrong!). After all
in my setup I login to ttyv0, su, and xdm. So in ttys I need to have
getty running on ttyv0, and as far as I can tell, getty wasn't running
on ttyv0 while xdm was on.

Recapping: when running some (serious) number crunching, I have on a
couple of occasions lost all connection with the keyboard. Cut and
pasting with the mouse worked (and executed) fine, but no typing. Does
anyone know of a way of regaining the keyboard without having to
restart xdm which is what I have to do at the moment? (and wait for
the number crunching to end first) This is with pcvt/XFree3.3.1.

Cheers,

Patrick