My var partition had proven to be too small on my SuSE 9.1 system, and so I copied /var/adm and /var/lib to an other partition and symlinked them to their original place. (All these done without exiting X11)

My rpm database got corrupted immediately: all entries disappeared. I copied those directories back, and could recover the rpmdb from a backup, but I still have a problem: special keys like ALTGR do not work ever since.

I wonder why my system got hurt by moving those directories, and how I can make ALTGR work again?

Can anyone help me with a hint?

Well did you shutdown any services that might have been using or had open files; writing to those directories at that time? If you didn't shutdown services properly and so on, that's most likely why.

Best thing to do when wanting to do such things on any partition/filesystem, go into single user mode and do it then, with minimal running services, etc.