Escape key stopped working in Lion (wired keyboard)

I upgraded my 27" iMac to Lion a few weeks ago, and over the last week or so I've noticed that the Escape key does not work. At all.  I am using a wired apple  aluminum keyboard with number pad.
My problem appears to be system-wide, as none of the usual things work.  I can't exit full-screen apps, cancel dialog boxes, or even get out of vi's insert mode in Terminal.  It's as if the escape key is dead
I've checked that speech recognition is not turned on (and changed the default 'Esc' shortcut to something else just in case), and checked all the other keyboard shortcuts to make sure it's not mapped to something else.  When I try to create a new keyboard shortcut, for example ctrl+Esc, it appears as:  ⌃⎋
and even the newly created shortcut doesn't work.
Is this a bug in Lion?  I would love to have my Escape key back, if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks for the tips, I had already checked that Speech Recognition was turned off (and i changed the shortcut key for good measure).  I also tried restoring the default shortcuts in each category in the system preferences pane, still no luck.
Then I randomly decided to reboot, and after that the Escape key started working normally again.  Strange behavior, and I'm not sure what program could have been eating the escape key, but I'm sure glad it's back. 

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