What in the World happened to the %#$&! keyboard? (Ubuntu 10.10)

[kitepilot at kitepilot.com]

No mine, my father's... 

He calls me to tell me that the keyboard on his freshly Ubuntu 10.10 install 
quit working.  He can't even login because he can't type the password. 

I tried the on-screen keyboard, which gets blattanly ignored too, but I am 
unfamiliar with the resource, so I could not draw anything conclusive out of 
it. 

I suspected a hardware failure, so I brought the keyboard home and it tested 
OK. 

I went back to his home and was able to manipulate the BIOS and get to the 
GRUB menu by holding down the left shift key on boot, got a shell, renamed 
his home directory to bypass whatever configuration he might inadvertently 
introduced, did dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg and rebooted. 

No keyboard...   :( 

WHAT IN THE $#!&^* WORLD HAPPENED TO THE KEYBOARD!!!! 

Other that a fresh re-install I don't know what to do... 

I hope somebody here has a better idea.
ET