Comment 182 for bug 195982

To all suffering from this issue...
It would seem that it is harder to track down what causes this issue. I did some googling and found it to cross distros, so perhaps its a kernel problem? A problem with vmware tools? Vmware itself?

Ok, so all said and done I just want to be able to use my kb without rebooting when this happens. I stumbled across the following page;

http://www.makesweet.com/bozo/2008/04/09/vmware-stops-shiftctrlalt-key-from-working/

Why not? I decided to try, the only problem is that when I open a terminal and press a key the terminal closes. Workaround? I copied the text from the browser (including the newline) and pasted that into the terminal and voila, it worked!

The text, if you are stumped and need to copy/paste from your terminal is...
setxkbmap

K, so for Ubuntu, which is Gnome based, I made a little script called fix kb and dropped it in /usr/sbin, chmod a+x... Contents as follows

#!/bin/sh

zenity --question --text "Go ahead and reset the keyboard map?"
if [ $? = 0 ];
then
 setxkbmap
 zenity --info --text "Done"
fi

I then right-clicked on my panel, add to panel, custom application launcher, put in the path to my app and now I have a clickable icon on my menubar so I don't have to mess around with copy/paste from a browser.

I hope this helps point those looking into this bug in the right direction somehow, and really hopes it helps those who are as stumped as I am with this issue and really don't mind a lill button to click on to fix it in the meantime.