I keep getting this happening in seemingly arbitrary apps.

It only ever seems to happen in KDE apps (i can remember it happening in Konqueror, Kopete and Kontact/Kmail). It doesn't last between sessions, and isn't shared between multiple instances of the same app. In tabbed apps, it seems to affect different tabs differently, sometimes only one, other times each tab has a different pattern of letters.

The letters vary, but once they appear they stay the same.

I've no idea what triggers it, or gets rid of it. It'll just appear, and sometimes it's there for the life of the app, others it seems to arbitrarily dissapear.

Any ideas?

my xorg.conf is here

Boy that is wierd...

I'll be watching this thread, I have no idea what that is..

IGF

Just been in Kmail/Kopete and when I held down ctrl for more than a couple of seconds they appeared on releasing the button, and then dissapeared when i did it again.

Not doing it now, though, or in any other apps.

I've just noticed that when I do the above, it says 'access keys activated' on the statusbar.

For whatever reason, KDE help doesn't want to let me search anything that's not a UNIX man page, but I did find this page on it. And a fair few bug reports. Evidently it's just a non-documented feature...

I think you only need to disable accesskeys in kcontrol. I can't check as I don't have kde at the moment but I remember having the same behaviour.

This is indeed a fast browsing method implemented in KDE. When you're browsing the web with Konqueror (and I guess it is the same for other KDE application), if you hit the Ctrl Key, the browser will associate keybord keys to links inside the page : you don't have to click on a link with the mouse, juste hit the key associated with it. It's a pretty cool method of mouse-less web browsing.If you hit Ctrl again, associations will disappear.

I've had this same quirk happen on and off for ages.
They pop up in text files occasionally, but I mostly see them
every now and then when I'm browsing, I've even seen them on
pages from this site.
I don't think it comes down to any particular thing that is
used, as it's been seen on a number of things like
Gnome, Ion, Firefox, Opera, Nano, Leafpad, etc, it just happens.
I don't have an answer, but I'm curious to know as well.