keyboard does not respond in gnome environment -resolved

[shur]

After an emerge world which brought in forty-some updates, I find the keyboard no longer responds in the Gnome environment. It works fine in console, and even in the GDM login. (This would seem to rule out an xorg problem).The mouse works fine, everywhere including Gnome. I looked at the messages from portage, but there were no clues that I could see. Nothing in the logs or dmsg either. Any ideas what the problem might be? Thanks.

The only gnome component that had been updated in the latest emerge was gnome-menus-2.30.5. I do an emerge world every week or so, so the problem update has to be a recent one.

Another thing I just noticed. If I log in as root, the keyboard works in gnome-session. So it is a permissions problem. Again, how can I find out what is going on here?

[shur]

It turned out to be something in .gconf or .gconf.d in my home directory that was blocking the keyboard input. I will leave it to greater minds to try to figure that one out.. for me it is resolved.