Before trying your suggestions, have you reviewed Bug #425979 which documents problems with both SHIFT and ESC for Grub2 on certain machines?
As for orange vs red animated dots, that's probably screen colour balance and subjective interpretation.
What do you mean by: Do Alt+Left, Alt+Right, or Alt+Fn keys work at this point? Do you mean LeftAlt+Fn or RightAlt+Fn (n=1,2,3,...,12)? Please clarify.
Before trying your suggestions, have you reviewed Bug #425979 which documents problems with both SHIFT and ESC for Grub2 on certain machines?
As for orange vs red animated dots, that's probably screen colour balance and subjective interpretation.
What do you mean by: Do Alt+Left, Alt+Right, or Alt+Fn keys work at this point? Do you mean LeftAlt+Fn or RightAlt+Fn (n=1,2,3,...,12)? Please clarify.