broken language settings

[mwimmer at mindspin.de]

Hi list, here's a rather long one:

Some days ago (I guess it was 2 weeks ago) usb devices were not any more
automounted.(dapper on a thinkpad t40, kde 3.5.5 ) After some search in
the forum I deceided to "downgrade" hal by installing Riddel's
hal_0.5.7-1ubuntu18.1_i386.deb and everything seemed to be fine.

Unfortunally I accepted the latest hal update this week, and my keyboard
went "crazy". I had to push every button for about a second to show up.
This behaviour was only experienced in X, not after console log in. The
only solution I found was mentioned in the forum: editing xorg as
follows: Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
# Manually changed this:-
#       Driver          "kbd"
# to this:-
        Driver          "keyboard"
# so as to use the "XkbDisable" option below.
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc105"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "de"
        Option          "XkbVariant"    "nodeadkeys"
        Option          "XkbOptions"    "lv3:ralt_switch"
# Manually added this:-
        Option          "XkbDisable"    "true"
# because otherwise there are keyboard problems.
EndSection

Typing speed was fine but now my german charset was broken. I solved it
by adding de-language versions of several programs ( OO, Firefox,
thunderbird) and managed to type german special characters again ( in
some apps)
I never managed to type an @, AltGr + shows nothing. The consolescrean
shows weird signs and some keys have strange funktions now.
dpkg-reconfigure locales or localeconf  gives my some perl errors about
language settings, after typing
export LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 the error won't show up
but the charset is still broken. When trying to add a new user (to check
wether only my personal settings are corrupted) system settings says
that the user and group modules are not installed, or broken.
Great news for me :-(

I'm happy that this is my machine and not a customers, because they
would have nailed me to the wall meanwhile, but its difficult to work
with it. So what could be a solution?

thanks in advance

mindspin