Hmm, come to think of, I think this behaviour (when the touchpad is turned on) is consistent with X receiving keyboard input that makes it think the Help key is held down. An experiment with Fn-F1 shows that while the key is held down, the keyboard is grabbed, just like what I see when the touchpad is turned on, but the Gnome help is not actually launched before the key is released.
(Perhaps on KDE it's different, it could be brought up immediately and continuously re-focused as the help key is thought to be held, maybe even using autorepeat.) Hah, I think I'll try going into the Gnome hotkey preferences and just turn off that Help hotkey, maybe that'll work around the problem... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org