Difficult keyboard glitch - advice sought

[corford]

Background:
On my advice, my boss bought an Italian T43 for our Italian sales manager. It arrived 1 week ago and I was sent to Italy to configure it.


The problem:
When I arrived and first switched the notebook on I noticed that I was unable to get certain keys to work. Specifically the @ symbol and the Euro sybmol. Both these symbols were on keys that contained other symbols (the Italian keyboard layout is different from UK/US).

After playing around and googling I discovered that ALT-Gr also needed to be pressed in order to get these symbols to work. The problem was, pressing ALT-Gr and the key did nothing. Windows just ignored the combination and would only print whatever the main symbol for that key was.

I spent ages playing with the IBM Keyboard software (I forget its name) but had no success. Eventually, I decided to uninstall the IBM keyboard software and simply instruct Windows (via Control Panel -> Regional & Language Options) to use tthe standard Italian keyboard layout and specified Italian as the input language.

This seemed to fix the problem. Windows now recognised the ALT-Gr + key combinations and printed the @ and Euro symbol with no problem.

Problem solved I thought... unfortunately NOT.

Since uninstalling the IBM software and just using the windows Italian keyboard layout, we now have a very bizarre problem whereby certain keys randomly stop working e.g. You can log in to Windows and everything will be fine, 20 minutes later you can be typing in Word/Outlook Express/Notepad/whatever and suddenly the "9" key will stop working and the "m" key also no longer works. Reboot and all the keys work again. Another 20 minutes/1hour/2hours later suddenly the "c" key will stop responding. Reboot and everything works again.

Sometimes it happens within 5 minutes of logging in to windows, sometimes it only happens after a few hours into a session. Different sets of keys stop responding but they are always from the same group e.g. sometimes keys "1", "9" and "[space]" stop working and other times keys "m" and "c". Each time the only soltuion is to reboot the notebook.

IBM have replaced the keyboard but this has not solved the problem. The problem is clearly software related but I have no idea how to resolve this.


My boss is now shouting at me, the Italian sales manager can't use the laptop and I am totally stumped for a solution... help!