I was checking carefully the configuration of the system. Found that it had selected three different keyboards at the same time, north american, english and spanish. Ok, I deselected the north american and english, because I´m in Spain. Then the system required to be reinitialized. After doing so, the problems where gone.
I tried to reproduce those problems by selecting back all three keyboards, but they did not come back! So, the solution was the initialization of the system… not the keyboard selections.

Solved but not very scientifically!

I’ve found laptops to be about compromise between two extremes. Either they’re powerful enough with large enough screens to be good at running graphical desktop applications or they’re small/light enough to be truly portable and convenient so you don’t hate ever moment of carrying them around. Then there are the laptops that fall in the middle, they do a bit of everything but nothing extremely well. Perhaps there’s a perfect compromise out there, but I haven’t found it.

The Aspire One is definitely on the small and light end of the scale. For checking emails, browsing the Internet, running twhirl to keep track of twitter, friendfeed and identi.ca, or writing blog post it’s great. Oh…I loaded Inkscape on the AA1 while writing this and the application runs very snappy after a re-sizing of the initial window, but I doubt you’d want to do any real design work on it.

I’ve been pondering whether to get a full-on notebook (I love the Dell M1330) or one of these ‘netbooks’. I’m still undecided – and budgeting doesn’t really allow for it at the moment, but I’ll be keen to hear how you’re using it over the coming months. I think it would be great for blogging, writing and communication stuff. I was a little bit worried about it’s uselessness for any kind of graphics work like Inkscape or photos, but then again, would an M1330 be much better anyway for that stuff? Likely not. Hmm.. maybe this netbook thing is the way to go. I might hit you up for some more info a month or two from now.

Again, congrats on the great gift. Your wife should be commended on her smarts.