Sporadically erroneous keystroke repetitions

[Nix]

On 11 Nov 2009, Oliver Block spake thusly:
> I sporadically encounter repetitions of my keystrokes. What happens is
> the following:
>
> I press any key, say "a", and instead of getting just one "a" I get many.
> Not just a few but it is like if I would keep pressing the key. Then I
> have problems stopping this. Often it does not stop itself.  I cannot
> tell what I have done exactly in these situations, but normally I tried
> to press other keys to make this stopping. I guess I often used Esc.
> Then normally it stops and afterwards everything is fine. But
> this happens quite regularly (once every few hours) and it is very
> annoying. This behaviour is somewhat new (since a few month). I am not
> sure, but maybe it started after switching from a Ubuntu system to
> Debian lenny now. The installed xorg has version 1:7.3+20.

Are you using kernels 2.6.31--2.6.31.4 on an SMP system or with PREEMPT
enabled? If so, this is a Linux kernel bug, fixed in 2.6.31.5.