On Tuesday 26 August 2008, Alan Stern wrote:
> > Attached a full diff between dmesg from two consecutive boots: first
> > without keyboard; after reboot the keyboard is detected. The actual
> > difference is fairly small and clearly shows that usb 3-1 is not
> > handed off correctly, probably due to a small difference in timing.
> >
> > Note that I've never seen this problem with earlier kernels.
>
> I can't tell exactly what's going on because your usbcore module wasn't
> built with CONFIG_USB_DEBUG enabled.

I got lucky on the second boot with -rc5 and USB_DEBUG enabled.
Attached the output of dmesg. After this boot the keyboard was dead and 
the telltale "reset low speed USB device" message is present.

Cheers,
FJP