Aha! I figured it out. It appears that this issue is the result of running the Synergy computer sharing service. When I stop Synergy the character doesn't repeating and typing continues normally and a repeating character stops if it was already repeating.

Using 0.74 on both i5 Laptop and Atom NetBook. After boot, any key that I press just repeats on the i5 but has always worked fine on the NetBook. After the repeating begins, then no other keys work and I can't Ctrl-C, have to close the window. Th only other obvious difference between the machines is …