MBP 17" is your keyboard dropping keystrokes and locking up?

Question

I have found it very frustrating to use my macbook pro to type anything.
There are four symptoms that I am experiencing:
*1. while typing, randomly certain letters will temporarily fail to respond, causing misspelled words.*
*2. while typing, at random, certain letters will get in a "stuck down" state and repeat several times until the key is pressed repeatedly*
*3. The white eject emblem appears on screen at random a few times. If I have a disc in the drive, it ejects as if something is pressing the eject button but nothing is pressing it.*
*4. Shortly after #3, the keyboard and trackpad will completely lock up and the computer must be left off for a period of time before the keyboard and trackpad will work again.*
If anyone else with a MBP 17" has these issues can you please reply to this thread?
Thanks

Answer 1

I took my macbook pro to the local apple store at La Encantada. There, a technician had no luck reproducing the problem I was having. I was very clear when i dropped off the laptop that the problem only occurs once the laptop heats up. After a tech had called me saying "no problem found" I was disappointed and I had to make a genius bar appointment the next day to have a technician look at it with me. Within 5 or 6 minutes of just opening safari and browsing the web I had the keyboard locked up again. Why is it that they could not accomplish in 48 hours of bench testing and diagnostics what I did in a few minutes?
I have a theory. The bench surface where I was seated at the genius bar is made of wood. It is more thermally insulating and must have trapped the heat beneath the laptop better than whatever they were using in the back. If you move the laptop to a different spot on the genius bar, you can feel the warmth on the wood of where it once sat. Not only this, but when the apple technician moved the laptop, the keyboard magically un-froze and it was working again for a few minutes. I asked him to hear me out and requested that he not move the laptop again, stating to him that once the bench beneath the laptop warmed up, the keyboard would freeze again. And within 2 or 3 minutes it did freeze again. I told him about the hardware disconnect noise and the freeze that also occurs in XP in the hopes that he would be convinced that it's not a software problem.
Now that he's actually seen the problem and could confirm my initial suspicions, he has gone ahead and ordered a new top cover. I am not sure if this includes a new keyboard and trackpad or if he will simply transplant my old one over to the new case top cover. I honestly can't believe that just a peice of metal alone was the cause of the problem.
Either way, before he calls me to pick up the laptop I hope he puts it up on the genius bar again for a few minutes to see if the problem persists. Whatever conditions they have back in that tech shop don't seem to be conducive to reproducing these kinds of thermal failures. Maybe their work benches are metal or too thermally-conductive?
I will post another update when I get to go see or retrieve my macbook pro.