Sequence of zeros (0000...) appears without key pressed

Dear all,

Some time ago my desktop-PC (setup: see below) started to generate zeros
('0') without any interaction. The zeros also appear while working at
the PC. Thus I get something like a very long sequence of zeros
appearing at the prompt of a terminal, in the input window of an GUI
application, or commands typed at the prompt are corrupted (e.g. "ema0cs").

Normally, the creation of zeros is relatively regular, sometimes faster,
sometimes slower. There are also time spans without any problems ...
When I press the shift key during such a sequence, I get the character
above the '0' without pressing the '0' key.
I tried a different keyboard (Dell, USB), but I observed the same behavior.

It even seems to get worse now! Sometimes, I can work after a reboot or
the generation of zeros stops after a while (or it starts after a while
if I did not have any problems since booting). I did a Virus check
(AntiVir) and found quite a number of Windows viruses in my Spam/Junk
mail folder, but removing these did not change anything.

The command 'netstat -a' does not show any strange Internet connections,
except for the connection to 'by2msg2204708.phx...' (Skype?). I hope
that I did not catch a virus, Trojan horse, root-kit or similar ...

I did have some problems with my Mainboard in the past (I got 2
replacement boards by Epox, all of them due to sound problems; the sound
problems also appear on my present board). A few days ago the mainboard
battery went empty, the board is not older than 3 years. My problems
started some weeks ago.


Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance,
Juergen


Setup:
------
- Keyboard: Cherry ML4100 USB
(USB keyboard, connected to PS/2 using an adapter)
- Mouse: Logitech Wheel Mouse M-BJ58
(USB mouse, connected to PS/2 using an adapter)
- Mainboard: Epox 8RDA+ (nForce2 chipset)
- Processor: Athlon XP2200+, 1GB RAM
- System: Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft, including automatic updates)
- uname -a: Linux ... 2.6.17-10-generic #2 SMP ... i686 GNU/Linux
- keyboard section from /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "de"
Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"
EndSection
.

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