Ubuntu :: Bash No Longer Supports The Character?

A very strange problem started for me today. I SSHed into a server and could not type the letter 'i'. It would work fine if I was not in an SSH session, but consistently and repeatedly broke when I started SSH. I rebooted my machine, and the problem now occurs any time I'm using Bash, whether SSHing or not. For the record, I'm doing all this in the standard gnome-terminal.

First: it is not a problem with my keyboard. As you can see, I am perfectly capable of typing the letter 'i' in a browser window. In fact, capital 'I' works fine in bash as well. If I start nano from Bash, I can type the letter 'i' all day long, but when I exit to the Bash prompt, again I am unable to.

What's even more bizarre, I cannot even paste the letter 'i' into bash, either via Ctrl+Shift+v or by middle mouse clicking. This makes it impossible for me to type commands like 'vim' or 'exit'. Bash scripts, however, appear to have no problem with this particular character. Now, I've commented everything out of my .bashrc file, but that didn't help. I got rid of my custom .xmodmaprc file. Still nothing. Keyboard layout is U.S. English. I removed all Keyboard Shortcuts that involve the letter 'i'. Rebooted half a dozen times, still no luck.

My workaround at present is to use zsh instead of bash. Everything works fine with it, but I'd really like to get this thing fixed.