Start Menu button (keyboard) --> K menu?
 

I'm running KDE 3.3.2. The proper behavior for the KDE K menu when you press the Start Menu/Win button is for it to pop up, just as the start menu would pop up in Windows. If it's already up, pressing the keyboard button again will cause it to go down.

When I ran SuSE, this did not work. I tested Debian and Mandraked limitedly, and it seemed that the K menu worked properly. Slackware, ditto, but the behavior is kind of strange.

If I reboot (or login to a new session), I can press the start menu, and the K menu will work properly. However, after I've used the session for a while (obviously doing something, but I can't diagnose what it is), the K menu will no longer respond to the Start Menu/Win button keypress. Occasionally, it will fix itself in the middle of a KDE session, but generally, it will not respond again until I reboot. Does anyone else have a similar problem?

Can't say I do.... my laptop has been up for 27 hours, and I just checked. It works here. (laptop is logged in to KDE, and playing MP3's on random loop in JuK)

never noticed...

..its official cross-platform name is the 'super' key by the way.

Numlock
 

Check your numlock key. I noticed a while back that my "start" key only brings up the K menu when numlock is off. When numlock is on, it doesn't work, although all my other keybindings that use the super key are unaffected. It's very weird. I never did get around to finding a fix for this.

Re: Numlock
 

Thanks, that's it. How strange.

I'm going to file a bug in KDE, if there isn't one already.

There are half a ton of bugs filed, but each keep going in endless circles of being marked as 'duplicate bugs' without actually being solved it seems...

It looks like once upon a time they did 'fix' this, and then removed the code (it looks like it was too much of a dirty hack, and didn't allow people to use the Win key as an alternative modifier key)

Have a look though and see if you can see if there's something else - or file another report to get them to explain exactly what's going on.