Presario CQ60 Weirdness

My brother calls me this morning saying the keyboard and touchpad on his relatively new Compaq CQ60 was not working. So, I packed up my usual troubleshooting kit and headed over to his house. On post, I noticed the keyboard was not working which seemed odd. The Vista login screen came up, I could enter his password, and eventually get to the desktop. However, the keyboard and touch pad were both dead! I went in to computer management, un-installed the keyboard driver and all of a sudden the keyboard started to work. As a result, Vista wanted a reboot, not sure why, but I proceeded. Again, no keyboard on post, but again at login. This time though, I had keyboard after login, but then Vista wanted yet another reboot. Again, I proceeded and found myself to be in the same situation. No keyboard on post, could enter password, but no keyboard after login. Grrr…
Spent more time messing with drivers, but nothing would help. Happend to find someone else with the same problem and here was the fix:

1. Shut-down the PC
2. Remove both battery and AC
3. Hold down power button for at least 60 seconds
4. Power up the laptop and the issue should (hopefully) be fixed

Apparently this does some sort of hard reset which fixed the problem, amazing. Seems the system was in some sort of funky state. In any case, hope this helps others in the same situation :’)