keyboard freezes with cursor as hand icon

Question

I've now experience twice on my MacBook Pro 6,2 with 12.04 and Unity, where some combination of two or three fingers on the track-pad causes almost all keyboard input to be blocked, and the the mouse-cursor is locked in the state with the closed hand as if I were dragging on the move window icon after having done a three-finger tap.

The mouse still moves, and I can do alt-tab to switch apps, but no other keyboard input is accepted, i.e. esc doesn't work, and click the mouse doesn't work except to activate other windows (you can't select menu options etc). So even when the terminal window is activated, I can't type in it. The only way out was to reboot by holding down the power key.

Has anybody else experienced this? What's a work around?

Answer 1

I've experienced a similar thing; just now, in fact.

The main difference being that I can do alt-tab and my cursor changed back to an arrow. Just one key stroke (or two simultaneously, depending on your pov), no quick repeats of Tabs/Alts/Ctrls etc. One thing I just read: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1220 discusses remapping special keys of your MacBook Pro built-in keyboard with Windows standard keyboard. Just a guess, but maybe that will let you use the alt-tab fix that works for me.

I'm running 12.04, but also experienced it in 11.10 and 11.04. I'm on a Toshiba Satellite P35-S6269. One thing I thought might be a source of the problem was that I've had difficulty updating my touch pad driver. It's listed in my Mouse and Touchpad Device menus as AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint.

Things that might be important: I was running Firefox and the Blue Fish Editor at the time.

PS I'm also doin' the xubuntu thang.

Answer 2

The solution for me was to close Firefox :

Click Alt key witch open a command dialog box (to search into firefox menus),

type «quit», enter, and then leave Firefox.