I've been running Debian Squeeze on my laptop for several months now and it's been ok. Today I start it up, and the first thing I notice is there is a ^[[26 being repeated all over the screen. It then goes into Gnome ok but the mouse (touchpad) doesn't work and the volume control on-screen-display is always on. And if I manage to startup firefox with the mouse, text fields will be flickering like crazy.

The last time it was working, I had let it install security updates, all of them some critical ffmpeg something or other and continued working fine. Only after booting the next day did this start.

This laptop dual boots windows 7, so I'm posting this from windows, which tells me there is no key stuck on my laptop and the mouse (touchpad) is working fine and something is just messed up with my debian.

I'm baffled and have no idea what to try Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Did you try to boot to "recovery mode". This will many times straighten things out on its own.

When you get to the text login, do so. Then at the user prompt that comes up type "startx" with no "" marks. This should take you to your desktop. It goes by to fast but try to watch the text as it processes that command. There may be a clue there.

If this does not correct the problem, you should be checking you logs.

I have tried the recovery mode. It's worse. What happens there is that ^[[26 repeats over and over and it won't let me type in the root password to get in. I also perused the logs and didn't see anything interesting from dmesg or the Xorg log. I'm not sure what other logs to check. On the off chance it was just a mouse thing I tried rmmod psmouse but it had no effect, neither did re-enabling it. I think next I'm going to try to downgrade the last security updates because that's all that's changed recently.

Thanks for the response. I'm going to go through the logs again, there's got to be something there. thanks.

well, this is embarrassing. So I went back into Win 7, everything seemed fine, figured I may as well throw in my old Slackware CD to at least boot up and mount the Debian partition and look at the logs again. And amazingly, the same repeating characters showed up while booting slackware, so it had nothing to do with my Debian install at all! Anyway, I started pressing all the special function keys for this laptop and when I hit the volume key (that I never ever use), suddenly the characters stop and I'm writing this from Debian again, problem solved. Weird thing is no matter how many times I hit that key now or hold down that key, I can't repeat the problem, but hey, I'm happy it's gone. Sorry for being a knucklehead - thanks to all who may have read the post.

I fail to see that your failure to use the volume key to correct this is being a knuckle head.

Sounds like serendipity played a lucky part in this to me. The volume key? Weird.

Hey, it worked. Be happy about it.

I am tickled pink. This sort of thing makes life interesting.