Number pad not working in Lucid

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I'm running 10.04.04 LTS on a Gateway laptop, and have been for a
couple of years.  Suddenly, the number pad no longer works.  Num lock
goes on and off, but no keypress produces anything in a document or
the command line, although the "+" seems to produce some escape
sequence (a menu appears).

I used it yesterday just fine.  It still works when I reboot to
Windows 7 64-bit.

I don't normally fool with such stuff, so I have no idea how to begin
looking into this.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD