[TriLUG] Flash ate my keyboard!

[Brian Henning]

Hi LUGgers,
   Thought I'd throw this out to the list and see what people's opinions 
on the problem are.

Does anyone else experience this behavior:

Flash, at least in Opera, eats my keyboard.  If there's a page with any 
flash on it whatsoever (which often seems to malfunction itself), from 
Flash-based games to Flash-based banner ads, it seems like the Flash 
plugin begins eating all of my keypresses, whether or not that 
particular Flash widget has focus.  As in, if I encounter a page with 
Flash, I can't even type anything in Opera's address bar; if I want to 
navigate anywhere else, I have to close the page and start over.

This can get pretty annoying if I'm using some ad-supported form-based 
service (such as whitepages.com, for example) and it happens to rotate 
in a Flash ad, and suddenly I can't type in any of the form fields.

Is this some known issue, or a borked installation on my part, or 
something more nefarious?

Happy Friday,
~Brian