Bizarre keyboard problem with chrome and firefox
 

I just installed Mint 17 onto a solid state drive on my laptop, but when I use Firefox OR Chrome browsers, I can't type anything. If I type into a search bar, a few letters will show up and then nothing at all.

Opera, which I'm using now, is not affected.

I can enter the password to my encrypted hard drive partition without difficulty and type in my username and passwork without difficulty. Its NOT a hard ware problem.

Opera is a fairly nice browser, but all my favorites are either in Chrome or Firefox and I can't get Opera to import them.

In any event, I'd rather fix the problem then do nothing and hope that it won't spread to my entire system.

In order to make sure that everything was up to date after installing I did run as root in a terminal and entered the command #apt-get dist-upgrade

Could I have gotten some beta driver or something not ready for prime time yet when I did that? If so, can I roll back all the updates to when the system was installed and try to just run the regular #apt-get upgrade command?

I've never heard of this before.

Will this glitch just get fixed in the next few updates?

I also tried reinstalling firefox and chrome, totally ineffective.

so this happens only with linux mint?
have you tried other (live) distros on the same hardware?
is the keyboard very, very slow (that would suggest something is eating your resources) or does it really stop COMPLETELY? can you still type normally elsewhere but in the browser window?

This is not a live distro. Its Mint 17 installed on a 3000 N100, an older laptop retrofitted with a solid drive. I reinstalled Mint 17 when I got the solid drive.

Do you think that backing up my data and reinstalling Mint will solve the problem? It seems pretty drastic for fixing a glitch.

My previous installation of 17 on an older hard drive didn't have this problem. The task manager indicates that about half the RAM is used and the CPUs are running at 30-50%. There are a total of 2 gigs of RAM and I have a Core 2 Duo CPU. Generally speaking, Mint seems to be very responsive, especially with a quicker hard drive. The installation itself was noticeably faster.

I can type in Opera (what I'm using now), when logging in and out, when entering the LUKS partition password. Its just the address bar and search window of Chrome and Firefox that cause the problem. The website doesn't change the problem.

omg, no, i meant: Try another distro to find out whether the problem is distro related. you don't have to install it for that.