I use spaces in Mac OSX Snow Leopard all the time. I feel that it’s a great way to order my running apps/windows based on task.

The problem is that when I change between spaces using the keyboard spaces sometimes freezes and some how hijacks the keyboard input. Leaving me with just the mouse to wiggle around..

I have been trying to find a fix for this bug that appears pretty randomly, and it’s been a while now. But I came across this Apple support discussion and there seems too be a bug reported in 10.6.3 on this.

The problem is definitely manifesting in spaces seizing the keyboard, but I think the problem may be with any number of apps that try to get or put information dynamically. (i.e. Textexpander’s snippits, Things’ global new task, Alfred’s snip, etc.) I’m no developer, but maybe there is some kind of bug in the cocoa api for injecting or scraping text that’s throwing this error?

There is some speculation that apps like Textexpander etc. is interfering with the keyboard. I don’t know what the cause of the bug is, just that it’s annoying.

… Everytime I switch to a space, my keyboard freezes. I open up Activity Monitor, kill the Dock process and it works again. …

To prevent me from having to do a complete reboot of the MacBook when this happens. I have dragged Activity Monitor to the dock for easy access if the keyboard fails, and if it does I open it up and kill the Dock process.And the keyboard starts to work again.