Keyboard Nonresponsive on quitting X

[DarxusZzZ]

I have a Dell Latitude LM Laptop running Gentoo. Yes, this is a Pentium 100, yes it only has 40MB of ram and a 2gig hard drive, yes I'm crazy, now that we're past all of that...

I've installed xfree86 4.3.0-r2. The problem is recurring regardless of my window manager. This problem happens when loading X and then leaving back to console. This will leave me with a nonresponsive keyboard after a matter of three or four minutes. The cursor blinks, it just does not accept keypresses. None of the laptop-native function keys work either (suspend, mute, invert screen etc...) I attempted turning off all APM functions to see if that was at all related... No joy. I can still SSH into the box and run programs (ie- shutdown -r now). I finished an emerge of Mozilla Firebird (told you I was crazy) while I could not use the keyboard for two days, it runs fine, I find that neat... but anyway...

I am wondering where the most likely cause of this is located. I do not believe I had this problem when using xfree86 4.2 though admittedly I didn't use X much then. However it could be something more specifically Gentoo-related, perhaps if anyone has found a similar problem before they could point some help in my direction, or even some way to regain keyboard access after it is lost (to avoid restarting.)

Thank you very much.