I typed
sudo dpkg --configure -a
enter your password

and tried the Users settings which was obviously wrong

Then i suddenly remembered - and this is weird!
I have a reasonable quality keyboard (standard ps2) and when i used it
with ubuntu it seemed to have a fault [repeating digits and even the
cursor moving across the screen from left to right - and no particular
pattern]. The same with two desktops i found when tested. I had a new
spare of the same type and tried that with the same result - both worked
fine on the windows machine. Decided to try another and got a
supermarket cheapy suspecting something must be wrong with that original
model. It worked fine on both machines and windows machine.

Last week when i set up my machine in the spare bedroom used a kvm box
(as i hadn't got room for a second monitor), and all worked fine at
first and i was using the original keyboard. When a login for a forum i
joined didn't seem to work i should have put this together with 'enter
your password'. Somehow it didn't enter additional digits but the cursor
must have somehow gone into this faulty 'repetitive mode'.

I've never experienced this before - so how can one be sure that the
keyboard is ubuntu friendly. I can only assume that ubuntu has different
keyboard sensitivity settings to windows. Anyone any ideas - would be
nice to know the answer as i'll have to replace the cheapy one day [and
to replace it with a more upmarket board i want to be sure that it will
work!].