For a while now I've been plagued with this ridiculous problem of the keyboard becoming "stuck" in my Fedora 17 VM running under VirtualBox. Keys would stop working until you held them down for several seconds, making typing close to impossible.
Of course my first thought was to blame VirtualBox, since it has a lot to do with the keyboard. I found out some interesting things, like you can send scan-codes directly to virtual-machines with something like
$ VBoxManage controlvm UUID keyboardputscancode aa
(get the UUID via VBoxManage list vms; figuring out scan-codes is left to the reader!).
I noticed the problem primarily happening while emacs was in the foreground, meaning I was working on code or an email ... my theory was when I typed too fast some race got hit and put the keyboard into a weird state that a reboot fixed.
Well it turns out the problem is almost the exact opposite and nothing to do with VirtualBox, scan-codes or race-conditions. Luckily, today I noticed "slow keys enabled" warning that sprung-up and went away quickly just before the keyboard stopped. Once I saw that the game was up; turns out this is a well-known bug that is easily fixed with xkbset -sl. It happens because I was typing too slowly; holding down the shift-key while I thought about something probably.
Hopefully this saves someone else a few hours!