I saw this problem recently on a system running a very old version of Debian testing. It's running xserver-xorg 6.8.2.dfsg.1-11 and VMware Workstation 5.5.6.
It looks like this is a problem with VMware, not with the X server or anything else. VMware apparently clears all the modifier maps when it grabs keyboard and mouse focus, and then "resets" them to their original values when it loses focus. I verified this by running the following in an xterm: while true; do xmodmap -pm; sleep 5; done This prints out the current modifier maps every 5 seconds. I then used VMware while this was running. When one of the guest machines has keyboard and mouse focus, all the modifier maps become completely empty. When VMware releases the keyboard and mouse grab (either by pressing Ctrl+Alt or moving the mouse out of the guest window), the modifier maps are reset to normal. I unfortunately don't have ltrace installed on this machine, so I can't tell exactly what X calls vmware is making underneath, but it definitely looks like this is VMware's doing. My guess is that VMware "forgets" to reset the modifier map in some scenario after it releases the keyboard/mouse grab. I haven't reproduced the problem again since I first saw it. (I originally saw it after I installed a Linux guest OS and installed VMware Tools on it. After I encountered the problem, I reverted to a snapshot of the guest that didn't have VMware Tools installed. I haven't seen the problem since. However, I'm not positive that VMware Tools was what caused the problem, since I only have this one data point.) -- Shift key (and caps lock) stop working when using VMWare https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/195982 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs