Regain control of keyboard

[Malcolm Fitzgerald]

Some days ago I type "portupgrade -a" on a machine which had just got a 
clean install of FreeBSD v6, with gnome, kde, sound, graphics, etc. In 
other words, a desktop plaything.

Every other hour or so process would stop at on options screen and wait 
for my input. Recently it has stopped accepting input from the 
keyboard. The mouse is still active.

How do I get my keyboard working again?

impatient