Who is messing with Ctrl-Alt-F{1,2,3,4,5,6} ?

[Richard Elkins]

There are emergencies (E.g. hosed desktop) when one would like to gather 
evidence and find out who is doing what to whom -or- who is waiting for 
whom.  I have always used Ctrl-Alt-Fn to break out of desktops for this 
purpose.  I would have found this quite helpful in writing up a bug 
report yesterday.

Unfortunately, it seems that I cannot do this in Xubuntu which is, of 
course, XFCE4-based - at least in the later releases.

When I press Ctrl-Alt-F1/2/3/4/5/6, my keyboard and mouse are no longer 
functional although the screen is still there.  Is the screen hiding the 
tty login prompt?  My getty sessions are running as evidenced by `ps ax 
| grep getty` in a terminal window.

Fortunately, when I press F7, I am taken back to normal desktop operation.

Could anyone shed some light on this?  I really would like to learn what 
component(s) are causing this anomalous behavior.  And, I'd like to fix 
this if possible.  Again, if it is my @#$%^&!!! Intel D2550MUD2 
motherboard, I am going to sue Intel into insolvency!  (-:

Thanks,

Richard