In what directory is the keymap file that is loaded at boot? Something odd has happened to my computer a couple of times where some different keymap than US becomes my keyboard at boot and my 'a' key is 'q' and a lot of other keys change as well. I can type 'loadkeys -d' and load the defualt but last time I found the file and replaced it with the default keymap.gz and that fixed the problem. I have forgotten where I found that file.
Lance