Comment 175 for bug 195982

FWIW, I had thought that this was due to my keyboard mistakes, e.g. pressing Ctrl+Space instead of Ctrl+Alt, and so I disabled the SCIM triggers as follows:

System->Preferences->SCIM Input Method Setup

->FrontEnd->Global Setup
 ->Trigger (delete Ctrl+Space)
 ->Next Input Method (del Ctrl+Alt+Down)
 ->Previous Input Method (del Ctrl+Alt+Up)
 ->Show Input Method Menu (del Ctrl+Alt+Right)
->IMEngine->Generic Table
 ->Full Width Letter (del Shift+Space)

This did not help, however. This condition is reproducible for me, as someone noted above, by holding down Ctrl+Alt while dragging the mouse out of a vmware-server 1.0.6 console running a Windows VM with VMware Tools installed.

A custom panel launcher to run setxkbmap is a workaround that works for me.

Specs:
$ vmware -v
VMware Server 1.0.6 build-91891

$ uname -srvmo
Linux 2.6.24-19-server #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 23:54:28 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

$ apt-cache policy xorg
xorg:
  Installed: 1:7.3+10ubuntu10.2
  Candidate: 1:7.3+10ubuntu10.2
  Version table:
 *** 1:7.3+10ubuntu10.2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:7.3+10ubuntu10 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages