right hand side of my keyboard no longer working
 

I uploaded some photos into Dropbox on my Linux Mint laptop for the first time. The right hand side keys on the whole keyboard no longer work. If I login as the other user everything works perfectly.

Offhand, it sounds as if something's gone screwy in one of the hidden configuration files in your home directory, since the other user works.

I have no idea which file it could be. I can think of two things I would do to troubleshoot this in the absence of any additional enlightenment:

1. Try another keyboard if I had one, because it's an easy and fast test, although I must admit that, in this case, it probably won't do anything but confirm that this is a software problem.
2. Rename the hidden files one at a time to something like dot-hiddenfilename-dot-old, log in and test. Repeat until the culprit is identified.

Hopefully, someone who knows which file(s) are the likely culprits will come along and suggest something less shot-gun like.

Gratuitous rant: This is why I like booting to a terminal. If the GUI acts up, troubleshooting it ever so much easier when you can log out to the terminal, try something, and log back in to the GUI.

My take is the word "laptop", and the "right side of the keyboard" clues.

By any chance, does your laptop have an integrated number-pad feature, usually activated by an FN key?

This is the sort of thing that's so much easier to sort out with the computer to hand! But here goes with some thoughts.

1. You say you can log in as a different user and all's well. That means it's not the hardware.
2. The keyboard driver is created after you log in by checking your requirements from your configuration files and then compiling a suitable driver by using source code in /usr/X11/xkb. If you weren't logged in as root and weren't doing anything to /usr, then the problem is in your configuration.
3. Are you using Gnome3? If you are, it might be a corruption of ~/.config/dconf. I'm not sure how that could produce the result, but it's worth considering in default of any better ideas.

So, copy that file to a safe place, just in case it's OK. Then log in as the other user, become root, and delete it. When you log in again as yourself, the file will be re-created.

Let us know if that works, and even more so if it doesn't.