When I took it to a specialist he thought it might be a software issue with Lion. He took out my drive and put in his drive with Snow Leopard and viola, problem solved. I used it for a few days with not a glitch. Put the old OS X drive back in and problem is back. Now I’m seriously considering going back to Snow Leopard. Seems pretty clear it’s just a serious bug in Lion OS X.

I had noticed that my MacBook Pro told me that I should replace the battery (for a while) and so I replaced it with another battery from another slightly older MBP. So far, things are going well and I have not noticed any “hesitations” in the mouse that I had normally experienced prior to a full lockup.

Am crossing my fingers and will provide an update after a while.

Pritam Pebam :
From a forum i went through, I’vent test it myself yet but it seems dat it works
“The solution that i found works is there is a small wire ribbon that is located under the battery. It is brown or orange color. with the plug in, take the bat. out and press on the uplifted brown ribbon wire and press the caps lock button. if your key pad works, place a small piece of tape on it and it should work”

Then I learnt that the situation was caused by the battery touching the two stripe connectors going to the touchpad.

So I unglued the plastic foil, took out the connectors from the mounts on the touchpad board (carefully open first the mount releases) cleaned the electric contacts at the end of the connectors and put them back. Both the keyboard and touchpad work now perfectly.

Apple store would have wanted me to pay for the new keyboard and touchpad though I told them what the problem was exactly.

If you want something done, do it yourself!

If you want to try this it sometimes works. Take your laptop to an Apple store. Calmly explain your problem, be Polite yet Persistent, and many times they will help you, even if your warranty has expired. It’s completely at the discretion of the manager of that particular store but it often works.

But remember, be Polite. Ranting and venting will get you nowhere.

I read somewhere and John Robertson states it in his post above, that you can use hardwareGrowler to indicate exactly when your keyboard and trackpad cut out but I installed it and it does not notice when mine loose connection (if that’s what is happening).

I think there is enough of us for a class-action lawsuit for this obvious flaw. None of us have done anything to bring this on ourselves and the Apple fixes are very expensive.

I use a 2007 MacBook Pro 15″

One new symptom that began to present itself along with the keyboard/trackpad issue was that of a “bad boot”; I would boot up the computer, and my trackpad couldn’t to multi-touch tracking, or it would be very sluggish. A hard reboot fixed the problem. Then I’d have other times when I’d boot up, but my menubar items would not completely load, resulting in a stalled startup. A hard reboot would fix it. Or I’d wake my computer from sleep to find a black screen. A hard reboot to fix.

Except this last time when I found a black screen, a hard reboot did nothing. Computer wouldn’t even turn on (it left just the indicator light on). And since my keyboard was unresponsive, nothing could be done. And no Apple care.

I’ve gotten written feedback from two extremely experienced IT people (one who ITed on government emergency systems; the other a Navy IT man) and both said nothing can really be done without the keyboard working. However, they didn’t open up the back to take a peek.

In a month I’ll be able to take it in to an Apple store for a free diagnostic.

No clue if that helped anyone, but I thought I’d post it.