Possible gconf problem: no keyboard anymore

Dear all,

I'm running gnome 2 with Mandrake 9 on a Dell laptop. Up to know 
everything was working perfectly. But at some point (I remember I was 
playing with the <shift>-PageUp/Down to scroll in the gnome-terminal) my 
keyboard became ineffective: impossible to send any key to the terminal. 
The only working keys are the Function key (Dell laptop) to play with the 
screen luminosity.

The problem appears only when I login with gnome (no such thing with KDE), 
under my username (with root no problem). 

At some point I managed to figure out that it might be a gconf problem 
(don't know how to get the version). 

I've tried to move the .gconfd directory into .gconfd.bak, and relog in
gnome with my username. Then I got some error messages saying that gconf
in unable to find the database... My environment configuration was lost,
but the keys were effective!!!

The thing is how can I get back my configuration on which I spent hours, 
step by step, and get rid of this keyboard problem??

Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thank by advance,
Guillaume