Hardware :: Apple Keyboard Constantly Changing Keycodes In X?

despite scorning the average Mac fanboy, I recently acquired a nice Apple USB Keyboard (aluminium model) which I admired for both design and quality. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't seem to like it very much - most importantly, the keyboard constantly keeps on changing keycodes and keymap, an issue I never had before. For instance, most of my bindings to close, maximize etc. lie on the "less" key (which is next to LShift on a German layout), but after every reboot, I have to reassign my bindings because either, it has traded places with "^" on a German layout (or "grave" on a US one), the key next to 1, or it has somehow changed its keycode and isn't recognized as "Less" any more, even though it kept its name.

Furthermore, most of the modifiers and similar keys like to throw a mixer dance, meaning that RAlt is suddenly Enter, Del is RCtrl, and so forth. All modifiers, the arrow keys, the block above them, all numpad non-numerical keys and Enter are involved. There seems to be no pattern or identifiable cause to this, except for when I start VirtualBox by VBoxSDL in fullscreen, it always does that (making me lose track of the Host Key, for instance). Also, after a while, the function keys seemed to be recognised - eject suddenly ejected my CDROM drive instead of executing its defined command, even though I never told it to. IIRC, no update to X preceeded this. As far as I can tell, all of these issues only appear in X, there is no problem on the command line. My system is a HP notebook (whose internal keyboard works a+) running a recently dist-upgraded Linux Sidux with kernel 2.6.32-1-slh.sidux and a fully upgraded X server with e17.

My keyboard definition with HAL is as follows:

<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbRules" type="string">base</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbModel" type="string">pc105</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">us,de</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">grp:alt_space_toggle,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,compose:rwin</merge>

I tried various keyboard models etc. in e17s internal layout manager, but all of them end up completely mashing up my layout.