some random concerns

[Unix Consultation Mailbox Phil]

I've got a number of questions having to do with some features of my 3/50.
They primarily have to do with the keyboard and the mouse, so shouldn't be
too bad :-).

Let me say right up front that I'm mostly a novice on these things, having
only had one since June (and having had much less than full use of it up
until the end of last month, but that's another story).  The questions
I've got are probably easy, I just can't find anyone who knows the
answers.

Keyboard

#1: I find myself constantly having to retype or edit something I just
tried to enter because the keyboard seemed to gag all of a sudden,
emitting a very rapid succession of clicks and sending either nothing or a
few completely impossible (as in "located nowhere near where my fingers
were") characters.  I've heard some other local 3/50 users complain about
the same thing, but most of them haven't noticed it.  Is this a known
problem, or do we have broken keyboards?  If the former, is there anything
that can be done about it?

#2: Is there any way to disable the two caps lock keys (F1 and Caps)?  I'm
getting pretty tired of hitting them "accidentally" and only finding out I
did it when I completely trash a file I just spent half an hour editing.
Half the time I can't even manage to get caps *un*locked with either F1 or
Caps!!  I went so far as to remove the keycaps once, only to discover that
it can still happen (somehow), and that not having the keycaps on makes it
quite impossible to undo.  (How one of those keys could be pressed
accidentally when I couldn't even manage to press one deliberately is
confusing the hell out of me.  I can only assume that something else is
happening, but I have no clue what it could be.)

[[ F1 is strictly handled by the Shelltool (or cmdtool).  Hitting F1
causes the string "CAPS" (as I recall) to be added to the title bar.  The
CAPS key is handled by the console driver and can be disabled.  There are
a couple programs floating around that change your keymap so that CAPS
doesn't do anything.  --wnl ]]

Mouse

After all our Suns were upgraded to 4.0 just recently (that's another
story that I won't get into now), I noticed that my rootmenu was a lot
smaller.  Not only narrower, but all the items on it were shorter
(vertically speaking).  I didn't think this would be a problem, but half
the time I try to pick something out of the menu quickly, I wind up with
the adjacent (above or below) item instead.  This can be a real pain when
I'm trying to lock my screen so I can catch the last bus out to the
satellite parking facility and some mega-slow-starting program like
iconedit comes over the ethernet instead.  What I want to know is, am I
the only Sun user who thinks there's a problem here?  (I am at this site,
anyway.)  If not, what are the two of us (:-) going to do about it?  If
so, is there anything I can do about it myself (besides cutting down on my
caffeine intake, which is not an option)?

Phil Kos                                       uunet!pyrdc!osiris!phil