Intermittent keyboard and trackpad freezes in 10.5.2 (not again!)

Hi all,

I'm having a major issue with my MacBook Pro built-in keyboard and trackpad. This issue is incredibly reminiscent of the previous widespread keyboard/trackpad freeze problems, documented in a number of threads, such as here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5860606
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1196400
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6103438
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1190210&tstart=0

What's special about this case is that these issues began very recently, well after I installed Mac OS X 10.5.2, which I recall is supposed to provide a fix for exactly this issue. I've never had a problem with this MacBook Pro notebook before, so this is incredibly unnerving.

The issue is frustratingly intermittent, but frequent. Sometimes the entire keyboard and trackpad locks up (freezes) and won't acknowledge any input whatsoever. Other times the keyboard and/or trackpad appear to get "choppy", sometimes the keyboard will miss a key causing a typo while typing or the trackpad will suddenly stop moving the cursor. Other times the keyboard will repeat keys by accident, causing maaaaajor typos (kind of like that).

What's really weird is that I'm seeing the floating "eject" bezel appear (the symbol that you see when you hit the keyboard's eject button) very frequently, when my fingers are nowhere near that key and I'm sure it's not pressed. This even happens sometimes when I'm not using the keyboard at all, just the trackpad (most often while scrolling with the two fingers gesture).

I've troubleshot this in a number ways. Here is one such troubleshooting session's activity log that I kept while performing the troubleshooting:

---- CLIP ----
MacBook Pro Keyboard Freeze problems troubleshooting log

* Symptoms are a frozen keyboard and trackpad, that is, no input being recognized by the keyboard or trackpad. Not even the light of the caps lock key lights up when the issue is present.
* Restarted computer. Issue recurred moments after logging back in and beginning to type.
* Restarting, zapping PRAM. Issue is gone for a little while but has recurred.
* Found a single line at the time issue began again in the "All Messages" log shown by Console.app that reads as follows:

4/24/08 Apr 24, 8:58:15 PM kernel USBF: 551. 7 IOUSBCompositeDriver[0x65b7280](IOUSBDevice) GetFullConfigDescriptor(0) returned NULL

* Restarting computer again, trying to boot in verbose mode. Can't!! Keyboard wasn't recognized even at this stage! Can't log in either, keyboard unresponsive at login screen.
* Restarting again (via external USB mouse). Login window comes up and keyboard input is acknowledged. Very strange.
* Keyboard input lost once again after using the keyboard for a short period of time.
* Restarting, zapping PRAM again, and Logging in as Leopard's "Guest" user to try and isolate issue...no good, just seconds after logging in, the keyboard and trackpad freeze again.
* Restarting once again, this time everything works. Noticed that the keyboard backlight is not lighting up in low-light situations. Trying to change the light level with the keyboard keys always results in the keyboard backlight bezel showing up with a prohibitory symbol. This is looking more and more like a keyboard driver issue.
* Repairing disk permissions, no problems reported. Verifying disk itself, no issues reported. Issue persists.

Observations and Lessons learned:

* This issue began slowly, with freezes sometimes happening hours apart from one another, however it accelerated quickly. Now sometimes only mere seconds after logging in, my keyboard is frozen and sometimes the keyboard is even frozen at boot time, so that start up modifiers are not even recognized!
* Zapping PRAM helps, sometimes, but only for a short period of time.
* No other traditional Mac fix seems to affect the issue (repair permissions, etc.)
* The issue occurs regardless of whether or not any peripheral devices are attached to the system.

Perhaps unrelated, but interesting (and new!) to note:
* The Bluetooth menu item reports that "Bluetooth: Not available", the Bluetooth System Preference pane is not visible, and System Profiler reports that "No information found" about Bluetooth.

---- END CLIP ----

I've yet to try resetting the SMC, or doing a clean install, but from the copious amounts of users who reported similar errors in the threads I linked at the start of this post, those options only sound marginally hopeful.

Some of these issues (like the weird eject key suddenly firing on its own) have been present for a little under a week, but the freezing is brand new. The only system-wide change I've made in the last week was installed the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1, which was successful (verified in System Profiler; my boot ROM version reads as MBP31.0070.B07).

So mostly I want to know if anyone else using OS X 10.5.2 is also experiencing this problem. Also, though I'm grateful I could actually use my built-in keyboard to type this message (even with occasional missed keyboard presses, GRRR!!!) my only reliable workaround is an external keyboard. Which is a decidedly annoying thing indeed.

Help?!?

Thanks!
-Meitar Moscovitz

P.S. AUGH! Just as I was typing that last sentence the keyboard froze again! So I'm actually finishing typing this post via a VNC session. So, so, so so frustrating!