I've tried several other things, to no avail - so I'm sticking to jwm for now.

This has been repeated twice. 1. Installed the latest Precise 5.4.3 2. tested out the system, keyboards work 3. Installed XFCE4 and XFCE4 goodies 4. rebooted 5. During boot, before jwm or xfce4 gets control, the keyboards work (esc and enter worked on the boot selection screen, keyboards work in wiz...