Brightness up breaks gnome

[jacobleonardking]

This problem arose today:
While in GNOME, the brightness up button on my laptop opens two gnome-terminal windows, crashes all GNOME widgets except the network manager, tracker and volume applets (and increases brightness). Luckily, I can run programs from the terminals, and metacity seems to be just fine, but there is no other way to run programs (GNOME keyboard shortcuts break, too).

dmesg shows nothing suspicious, and trivial things like restarting gdm (& the entire system) have been tried.

Suggestions? Thanks.

This is on an up-to-date Intrepid x86_64.

[The Dark Prince]

Hi, I'm also getting this problem on an Dell Inspiron 6400, with intel chipset.

Touching the brightness controls completely freezes up the entire panel and seems to cause a few keyboard problems as well, but these are hard to pinpoint.

Any suggestions?

EDIT: This happened when upgrading to intrepid on an Intel dualcore (32 bit).