additional USB keyboard for laptop (SuSE 8.2, if it matters)

Dear All

I have stumbled into a very strange phenomena trying to attach my USB
keyboard to the laptop. 

Equipment: USB keyboard and a mouse which connects to the keyboard

The very first time I connected the keyboard the
system recognized it along with the mouse. It was strange though that I
could not have external mouse work along with the touchpad by
default. When I reboot both USB keyboard and mouse did not work (touchpad
worked fine that time). I got nowhere playing with YaST and SaX2, so I
manually added USB mouse support into XF86Config (there was some
discussion about this at ReturnToNature before). All docs say that nothing
is needed for the keyboard. Neither mouse nor keyboard work.

There's one strange way to meke them work though - unplug mouse from th
ekeyboard, and plug it into the USB slot instead of keyboard (at this
point nothing works yet), then unplug mouse and plug the keyboard back (at
this point keyboard starts to work), and finally plug the mouse into the 
keyboard (now they both work). Of course, this helps only till the end of
the session. 

Does anyone see any effective way to fight with such a behavior?

Thanks

Dmitri