cannot switch VTs after switching to vt7

[Brolin Empey]

I am using KDE and KDM with x11-base/xorg-x11 v7.1. Sometimes, when I use /etc/init.d/xdm to restart KDM, I have to restart the xdm service at least twice before X will start. The first time I try restarting xdm, I get a message saying "Error: Could not start the Display Manager" on vt7, which is the VT usually used by X. When I successfully restart xdm, X uses vt8. This is not a problem. The problem is that after I switch back to vt7, I cannot use my keyboard to switch to another VT! My PC is unusable until I use another PC on the LAN to run chvt on my PC via SSH. I even tried using loadkeys to make Ctrl+F1 switch to vt1. This binding works on all the text-mode console VTs except for vt7.

Any ideas? Is there a way to return vt7 to a normal state after this happens, so that I can switch VTs after switching to vt7? I try to avoid switching to vt7 when this happens, but I inevitably forget and have to run chvt over SSH.

Thanks,
Brolin

[desultory]

Have you determined what program is using /dev/tty7? That can be done using lsof /dev/tty7, lsof is provided by sys-process/lsof.

[Brolin Empey]

There is no process using /dev/tty7. However, the interactive Bash on tty1 is shown as using /dev/vc/1 in the lsof listing. If I grep the lsof output, there are no other processes using any file under /dev/vc/ nor any file whose name contains /dev/tty.