I thought I give it a try. I mean, why should I develop on my machine when I could do it on the server farm?
But the ctrl key didn't work. When I pressed Ctrl-l in xterm, it just printed an "l", instead of resetting. Usually, it means xmodmap problems. But this was between Ubuntu boxen. A quick run with xev showed, that Ctrl-l did for key events: l-down, l-up, ctrl-down, ctrl-up. So it did get the key, it just delayed it somehow, until I released the l key.
The solution?
System/Preferences/Mouse/Pointers, and uncheck "Highlight the pointer when you press Ctrl"
