When I go into full screen mode, I'm unable to bring up the F8 menu.
No key combination works. I've read somewhere that grabKeyboard
variable is the solution and I found it under the RESOURCES section in
the vncviewer's manpage. How and where do you set that variable to
true and is this actually what I need?

Try using F11 to move in and out of full screen.

Nah, that didn't work.

Take a look at this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=352591

Didn't really find anything helpful. Ctrl + Esc doesn't work for me either.

You probably don't care, but here is the problem as I see it (as this is why this happened to me):

Under Gnome (and probably a lot of WMs), you went into full screen which removes the window from the alt-tab switching list. You at some point hit alt-tab or something like it to switch focus on the remote machine, but Gnome grabbed the keys before the VNC could get them. So you switched focus on the local machine. This means that any keypresses, including F8, arrive at whatever window you happened to switch to, not vncviewer. Now you cannot switch back to the full screen VNC viewer because it isn't in the alt-tabable window list, and you can't send an F8 to vncviewer, or any keypress for that matter.

This seemed to be what was happening to me. I had to jump to a virtual terminal and killall vncviewer in order to win back my computer. So I won't be using vncviewer in fullscreen mode any more.

I know this is old, but this happened to me today with Karmic and it wasn't the first hit on Google (and Ubuntu Forums (the first hit) doesn't allow you to post to old threads).

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