Comment 149 for bug 194214

Ah, I forgot to note here that disabling setup-hotkeys or hotkey-setup or whatever it was called didn't solve the problem after all. However, an old mailing list posting from 2003 hints at the keyboard handling in the kernel 2.6 series being the cause of a remarkably similar problem:

"The answers differ for 2.4 and 2.6. For 2.4 each keypress is a keypress,
and key releases are rather unimportant as long as the key is not a
modifier key. For 2.6 we have synthetic repeat, so a second keypress from
the keyboard is ignored, the key repeats with kernel-defined frequency,
and the repeat is ended by the key release."

http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/9/14/148