Here’s an odd little tidbit from earlier this evening.
My neighbor stopped by with a computer problem. He had the restore CD for his Dell, but couldn’t seem to get the Dell to want to actually boot from that CD. No matter what he tried or changed in the BIOS, shortly after selecting the CD Drive to boot from he’d end up at his typical XP logon screen.
I had him bring the CD over to my place and we tried it on one of my machines. I selected the CD, hit the “any key” when prompted and it worked fine. OK, so now we knew the CD was good.
I followed him back to his place to see this problem first-hand. We booted up the PC, hit F12 to select the boot device. On the device list I scrolled down and chose the CD Rom drive and hit enter. Go the “hit any key to boot from CD” prompt, hit a key…
Say, wait a minute, that prompt didn’t immediately go away as I would expect! And look, we booted from the hard drive anyways. Like, oh I don’t know, we hadn’t actually hit any keys.
A quick check showed me his keyboard is USB. While it works fine in the BIOS and at start up, when on that prompt to boot from CD the keyboard doesn’t work! (I tapped Num Lock a few times – with no response – to confirm). In other words, we couldn’t ever hit the “any key” with it.
Problem solved. I handed him a PS/2 style keyboard from my spares and haven’t heard back since.
Weird one, eh?
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January 20th, 2009 
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Was USB Legacy Mode on in the BIOS? On my computer the keyboard and mouse won’t be initialised before Windows starts unless that is on.
Good question — in hindsight it must not have been. I may have to walk across the street tonight and check
I was just surprised to have the keyboard work (BIOS or select boot device), then not be seen at all when time to hit any key to boot.
BTW I actually had this happen on a Dell with only USB ports. I found that just changing the USB port it was plugged into fixed it. No idea why, I tried again in the original spot and once again it didn’t work.