For some reason, when I logged into my account on my Dell Latitude D620, typing on the keyboard was only possible when the key is depressed for it to repeat. Single characters were not appearing. I logged out, logged into another user and the keyboard response is as expected. I thought something was amiss and went about running “yum -y reinstall gnome*” thinking that it was some gnome setting that was messing things up. The update did nothing to change the behaviour and only when I went to (Fedora 9/Gnome): System->Preferences->Hardware->Keyboard under the Accessibility tab, the option “Bounce Keys”‘s option “Ignore fast duplicate keypresses” was checked. Unchecking it solved the issue. I am not sure how it got checked in the first place. Thought this should help someone.