MBP keyboard stopped responding; why?

[zettaichan]

I just had something weird happen with my MBP (17" Core Duo with 2GB RAM.) The keyboard stopped working. I couldn't type anything or use the spacebar to scroll down in the browser.

I was running Camino, Firefox, Preview, and iTunes. I shut down iTunes, and the keyboard worked again.

Then, a few minutes later, I popped open a new Firefox window, and opened some tabs in it. In total I had 3 FF windows going with about 15 tabs. One window was playing a podcast.

The keyboard stopped responding again. I closed the podcast window. That didn't help. Then I closed five tabs to get rid of the second FF window. Once I was down to 1 FF window with 9 tabs, the keyboard came back.

Has anyone experienced a problem like this? Any ideas what the cause could be? I've run more programs than this simultaneously before and it wasn't a problem.

I'm plugged in to the power outlet and the battery is charging, so the MBP is somewhat warm, but it's been hotter than this before. I had it sitting on a flat wood surface so it should have been adequately ventilated.

I'm at a loss what was different this time that made the keyboard go out.

Thanks for any advice or tips anyone can give...

--
AJ

 

[Pressure]

Had that problem with several instances of Firefox beta.

Restarting the application fixed it. Doesn't happen with the newest release.

 

[zettaichan]

I'm using Firefox 2.0; I thought that was stable.

Still, if that's the likely issue, that's a relief. I'd rather have a problem with Firefox than a problem with the MBP.

Thank you!

--
AJ