Get this error whenever I press the up-arrow. I looked in inittab and it says you get this when you press Alt+Up...however I'm not pressing Alt.

Is my Alt key stuck? Problem seems intermittent and would probably explain very odd behavior of being able to switch ttys by _only_ pressing F1,F2,...etc and other problems where whenever I type something it ^[ is prepended (for example if I try to login as root: ^[R^[O^[O^[T)

This is a Dell Latitude C840 Laptop, which was bought used meaning it's entirely possible the keyboard has some sticky keys, but has anyone seen this type of problem. It happens regarless of X running or not (happened on the text-based installation - debian sarge 2.1)

If it happens in X and outside of X then I would be tempted to say there is a physical problem with your keyboard.

The reason I say this is that X has its own keyboard drivers and so does the Linux console, and to have the exact same problem with both is pretty unlikely.

Yup it was the keyboard. Laptop was defective.