Keyboard becomes unresponsive under the GUI.

Hi: being in the GUI, the keyboard suddenly becomes unresponsive and I have no remedy but to press the machine's reset button. I have never observed this failure while in one of text consoles (/dev/ttyN). When booting, the screen first prints data pertaining to the graphics card (Nvidia). Then:

AMIBIOS© 2003 American Megatrends, Inc.

P4i65G BIOS P1.00

and line 25 reads:

<big number sequence>-INTEL-P4i6G013-Y2KC

The keyboard is USB. I have it plugged into one of the machine USB jacks.

Code:

local:~# lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 02)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P PCI to AGP Controller (rev 02)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)

00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c2)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller (rev 02)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02)

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (rev c1)

02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

local:~#

This has happened under both slackware 12.0 and slackware 14.0 running Xfce 4. Sometimes, unplugging the keyboard and plugging it into another USB jack brings it again to life. One thing can be relevant. In order for the keyboard to be recognized, in the BIOS setup menu, I have to choose 'Legacy USB enabled: yes'. If I don't do this, after quiting the BIOS menu, which takes me to the bootloader (lilo) prompt, the keyboard will not respond. This is all the information I am aware of at this moment. What can possibly be the mystery behind this strange behavior?

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