Have been having quite a few screaming sessions with the computer over it's insistence on entering a chording-key-entry mode every time I press the control and shift keys together (which I do all the time while editing). Took almost three hours this evening, but I finally tracked down the problem and fixed it.

Turns out that it's part of the default layout for microsoft keyboards. To disable it I just told xmodmap to eliminate the "Multi_key" definition for ctrl+left-shift and voila, solved problem. Took another 10 minutes or so to figure out what was wrong with .xinitrc (I was using "exec startkde", as all the docs say to do, using "/usr/kde/3.3/bin/startkde" instead got it all working).

Now back to Cinemon after I give my hands a few minutes to recover from all this typing and tension.