Well, when I got Red Hat 7.3 installed and working on a second hard drive, booted it up, copied over my home directory, did the magical startx... the keyboard in the GUI worked.

So... it's probably a hardware problem. :)

Soooo.....what did you do to your software in-between reboots that clobbered X dealing with the keyboard?

Heh. I have <b>no idea</b>.

Like I said, I've had a stable system for six months. XF86Config hadn't been touched since December; XF86Config-4 hadn't been touched since February, when I edited it to add another mouse.

I hadn't updated any system software, hadn't been running as root all the time or anything...

Yet when I started X, the keyboard wouldn't work... and, here's the clincher... <b>NO</b> EE's in XFree86's startup log! Everything seemed to come up fine, but the keyboard just wasn't working.

I've got a pretty good background in UNIX and I know Red Hat Linux extremely well. Yet I cannot think of a single reason as to why this happened or how.

I'm still not happy, because Red Hat 7.3 isn't working quite the way it should be (its networking seems very slow) and I have to copy everything back over, plus reinstall about a trillion programs that I use. The biggest pain, by far, is getting personal preferences set back up - for some reason, when I copied them over, I lost all my launchers and GNOME preferences... of course, I can always re-copy, but it's still a pain in the ass. Not sure why it happened like that.

Anyway, eventually I'll get it figured out. It's just frustrating as hell.