[lug] Keyboard Map Problem?

[Nate Duehr]

Well, I was stumped today by a co-worker who'd done something
"interesting" to his laptop.

He's running a Toshiba Tecra 8100 as a dual-boot Win2K Pro and RH 7.0
(fresh install) machine. 

Somewhere along the way today, his "d" key stopped working. 

Here's the part I don't understand and it's making me nuts...

At the login prompt with just the getty and the login program doing the
keyboard chores, it works.

As soon as you hit Bash (or any other shell, we tried changing his
default login shell), and get your prompt.  "d" stops working.

Certain programs like vi would cause it to start working again.  I
have a number of assumptions why, but my assumptions don't seem to
explain the behaviour, so I obviously must have a HUGE knowledge gap in
my understanding of how Unix systems get user input. 

Two things:

1. What the heck was going on here?  Any theories?
2. Can someone guru-ish enough to know briefly summarize the usual
things that happen to things like the keyboard setup on a typical Linux
system... how do my pokes and pecks end up doing useful things and how
can I mess with it.  (not that I want to, but now I'm just downright
curious about this "stuff" that 99.9% of the time "just worked" so I
never learned about it very in-depth.

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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