Comment 107 for bug 124406

I've been having this problem ever since Feisty, IIRC. It is most prone to happening in Firefox, which led me to believe for some time that a FF extension was the culprit. Among the ridiculous amount of extensions I use (30+), I use SwiftTabs and Locationbar². The first one ties my '1' and '2' keys to navigating between tabs, much like in Opera. The second one enhances my location bar to hide the protocol part, separate the directories in a cleaner way and allow me to navigate to any directory in the URL by simply clicking on them.

The reason I mention this is because 90% of the time (about 4-5 times a day), the keyboard gets stuck on either the '1' or '2' key, which makes FF scroll trough the opened tabs uncontrollably, making my CPU jump to 100% and the system completely unusable for 10-15 seconds (sometimes more or less, I haven't found out what determines the length). I can see the title bar change during that time, but can't control what is happening. Sometimes if I mash on the ESC key I think I manage to make it stop after a few seconds, but it might not be me doing this after all. After the title bar is done scrolling through the opened tabs, FF renders the page it decided to leave me on, but I still can't use anything, because the location bar now has to go through the same thing. This part is usually faster, but because I have Locationbar² it still takes almost the same amount of time as before.

The remaining 10% of the occurrence of this error is in cases the Ctrl+W combination gets stuck and I end up closing too many tabs than I'd like (sometimes it doesn't stop until all tabs are closed). And it also happens with Ctrl+T, where I end up with 20-30 new tabs, and have to close them manually afterwards.

Aside from FF, this has happened in OpenOffice and other apps, albeit not very often.

FWIW, I use btnx to add functionality to my mouse, and XBindKeys for a few custom shortcuts. I use Compiz, but this error seems to happen even more while I have it turned off and am using Metacity, so I doubt this is a Compiz/GLX issue.

This is a really frustrating bug. Hijacking my system like this is absolutely ludicrous. Among all the different errors my 6-month installation of Ubuntu has (having to run swapon manually, no text in virtual consoles, an audio issue that prevents me from playing audio two times in a row in the same application (watching YouTube freezes Firefox), the OpenOffice/Qt4 font aliasing bug, this repeating key problem, and a couple more) I was really ready to throw in the towel and do the Windows-maintenance-procedure (format, re-install). But since Hardy is just around the corner (and I don't plan on mucking around with pre-releases), I'm counting the days towards the moment I can have a fresh Ubuntu installation. It's painfully ironic that this paradigm of keeping a system in a healthy running operation exists on Ubuntu as well. I hope this gets ironed out in 8.04.