Okay, I know this isn't a "solution" per say, and it may not help many of you, but hopefully it helps at least 1 of you. It did fix my problem.
My six month old banged on my keyboard, and my arrow keys stopped working on my putty session into a Debian box. They did work everywhere else (all other programs outside of putty). After Googleing and even landing here (I was going to close this tab, it didn't solve it for me). I tried something. I opened a new ssh session to the same box, and my arrow keys worked. I joined my screen session and they did not work. So something just happened tied to the current screen session disabling the arrow keys. Unfortunately, I was (am) in the middle of a big project, have 28 windows open in my screen session, and didn't want to close the session, loosing my place on all 28 windows.
So..
While on the bash shell, I tried all combinations I could think of, of CTRL + up, down, left right, ALT + up, down, left, right, SHIFT + up, down, left right, CTRL+ALT+ up, down, left right, CTRL+SHIFT+ up, down, left right, etc. Still with no luck, I also tried the windows menu and windows app keys with up, down, left right.
Now my arrows work again! Something about one of the combinations of what is above and the arrow keys fixed it.