My shift/ctrl and numlock keys stopped working

Question

My ctrl and right-shift keys are not responding, though they still work in a VMware window. Numlock doesn't work. A held-down key does not repeat. clicking in a field in another window does not make that window active.

Can I clear whatever's making it sick without rebooting?

It started (approximately?) when my full-screen VMWare workstation instance on Desktop 2 was missing and found as a small window on Desktop 4. It moved by itself or I accidentally entered a strange command while working on Desktop 1?

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Linux Mint 17.1 Rebeca, standard Cinnamon desktop.

Answer 1

I found the answer on this blog post.

First

egrep -i 'rules|layout|model' /var/log/Xorg.0.log

to note the values of interest, and then (in my case)

setxkbmap -rules evdev -layout us -model pc105

to restore them. If the keyboard/X-console is too hosed to use at all, the original poster used SSH from another machine and prepended DISPLAY=:0 (Though I'm not sure where that goes). Another commenter plugged in another USB keyboard temporarily.

The blog poster indicates that VMWare is to blame, which makes sense since that's what I'm using too. Another commenter noted that he has the problem with VNC.

I put this line in an executable file on the desktop, for future need. I'm assuming that the values don't change unless my hardware changes.