HT4809 Has anybody else been experiencing mass USB keyboard death?

Question

In the last month alone, 9 USB wired aluminium type Apple keyboards under 18 months old have had one or more keys sticking or stop working from a user base of 40 users i.e. almost a 25% failure rate.
The majority of these keyboards are already replacements for previous keyboard deaths of the same model and many have only been in service for 2 or 3 months before they die but sitting shrink wrapped in storage (cool, dry place) for 6 months or more before that, so warranties are questionable at best.
These numbers exclude obvious keyboard deaths such as coffee spilliage. Generally users come in in the morning or back from lunch and suddenly their keyboard has stopped working either with keys being stuck or just parts of the keyboard dying e.g. no numbers or random keys such as "a" and "d" stop working. This can happen while a machine is running or on a fresh boot after a clean shutdown.
Standard troubleshooting - change usb port, reboot machine, check the user has not turned on anything funny via system preferences all turn up no results. The onscreen keyboard does not clock the dead keys as being pressed but replacing the keyboard fixes the problem every time.
Keyboard death is not OS specific as we are running OSX 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 and keyboard death shows no specific swing to a certain OS. Plugging a dead keyboard into a Mac running a different flavour of OSX still shows the same symptoms as on the machine where the problem began.
The usage is standard web browsing, email and document editing in an air conditioned office environment. We have a mixture of people ranging from those who still type with one finger to people who touch type at high speed but this does not seem to affect the life of the keyboard at all.
These keyboards are a mixture of US layout and Japanese layout keyboards.

Answer 1

Keyboards are a low power device.   Go to the system profiler to determine the power of the various port buses.   Plug the keyboard into the USB port that is not low power.
Either that, or replace the USB cable, or add a USB hub that has wall power from outside the computer.