charset broken

Some days ago (I guess it was 2 weeks ago) usb devices were not any more
automounted.(dapper on a thinkpad t40, kde 3.5.5 ) After some search in
the forum I deceided to "downgrade" hal by installing Riddel's
hal_0.5.7-1ubuntu18.1_i386.deb and everything seemed to be fine.

Unfortunally I accepted the latest hal update last week, and my keyboard
went "crazy". I had to push every button for about a second to show up.
This behaviour was only experienced in X, not after console log in. The
only solution I found was mentioned in the forum:
editing xorg as follows:
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
# Manually changed this:-
# Driver "kbd"
# to this:-
        Driver "keyboard"
# so as to use the "XkbDisable" option below.
        Option "CoreKeyboard"
        Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
        Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option "XkbLayout" "de"
        Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
        Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"
# Manually added this:-
        Option "XkbDisable" "true"
# because otherwise there are keyboard problems.
EndSection

Typing speed was fine but now my german charset was broken. I solved it
by adding de-language versions of several programs ( OO, Firefox,
thunderbird) and managed to type german special characters again ( in
some apps)
I never managed to type an @, AltGr + shows nothing. The consolescreen
shows weird signs and some keys have strange funktions now.
dpkg-reconfigure locales or localeconf gives my some perl errors about
language settings, after typing
export LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 the error won't show up
but the charset is still broken.

So what could be a solution?

thanks in advance

mindspin