I have a raspberry Pi 3B+ running retropie 4.7.20 installed from the image from raspberry pi's repository.

first let me say all my dos games i have installed in DOSBox under retropie/emulation station are working correctly as i have it.
however...
i recently installed attract mode for other reasons and found that i am having some severe keyboard problems with dos box.
the result is non functional keys, inability to operate games that require a keyboard for input.
i first thought nothing was getting through, but then i assigned a hot key to exit back to attract mode. it will exit, however it also does not kill the game! music continues. i can even start several instances of any game. if they require a keyboard input to exit the game only a hotkey will get me out.
here's the thing... the hot key rarely works! i discovered by pre-rogramming a hotkey combo to my controller buttons i could bring up the keymapper without the keyboard. (ctrl-f1 not working due to the problem)
so i re-saved the keymap file but that didn't help any.
on my next go around, i discovered that there was an extremely long and irregular latency after a keypress. and if you're not holding the key it wont register. and if you are at the DOSBox prompt c:\ and you hold a key down until it shows up onscreen then let go, (1 to 3 seconds) it becomes sticky! 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 like this. filling an entire screen until you press another key. then it becomes sticky. I have found that entering the keymapper and exiting it will stop the sticky key. but then i have no prompt and cant get one. and if i could i cant type exit! i am left with SSH in, pidof dosbox to get the process number, then kill [process number], thinking that was enough, i still could not type at the linux CLI prompt. so i still had to enter a reboot over SSH.

i have made sure that the proper codepage is loaded, us437 i think should be built in.
again, all configuations are working if i launch from emulation station. but not attract mode.
so it looks like 2 problems that may be interlaced... keypresses not getting immediately serviced. and a process that wont kill when hotkey'd out.
can anyone help?