Arrow keys don't work in Flash games

[bimmersteve]

So my daughter is one of the zillions of kids addicted to this Club Penguin thing (for those without kids, in a nutshell it's virtual game/world with a series of embedded interactive flash games.) On every other mac in the family (a G3 at my parent's house, my mac pro) she has no issues playing any of the games. However, on the old G3 I have that I've assigned for her use, any of the games that use arrow keys don't work. The game starts up fine, but any attempt to maneuver using the keyboard's arrow keys is unrecognized. (Otherwise--outside of these games--the arrow keys on this machine work fine.)

Things I've tried include:
-Using a different browser (Same behavior in Safari, Firefox and IE)
-Swapping from a USB to an old ADB(!) keyboard.
-Upgrading to the latest Flash player
-Deleting all files in the internet plug-ins folder and reloading them from scratch.

Help!

[vroom1374]

I'm having the same problem. If I create a new user account, they work again, so I'm assuming it has something to do with user preferences, but I'm not sure where to start looking

[hayne]

Here's my generic prescription for user-specific problems:
----------------------------------
You have determined that the problem is only with the one user account.
The problem thus is almost certainly due to something under your home folder.
And it likely is something under ~/Library
( ~ = your home folder)
The most likely thing is a bad preference file under ~/Library/Preferences
You could start by removing the preference files for the apps you are having trouble with. (The names of preference files usually include the name of the app they are for.)
If the problem persists, you need to narrow the problem down - you could start by moving (via drag & drop) the whole "Preferences" folder that is under ~/Library to the Desktop, then log out and log in again. A default copy of the Preferences folder will have been recreated. Does that improve things? If so, you could use a divide & conquer approach to figure out which of the preference files is causing the problem - move half of the preference files back into the Preferences folder, log out & in again, etc.

If the problem persists, try the same thing with the other sub-folders of ~/Library. E.g. with ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/InputManagers, ~/Library/Fonts, ~/Library/PreferencePanes, ~/Library/Application Support, ~/Library/Application Enhancers, contents of ~/Desktop, etc.
Also remove any files owned by your user in /Library/Caches (the Library folder at the top-level of the drive) or the sub-folders of /Library/Caches (e.g. the font caches under /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS)

[bimmersteve]

Thanks to both of you!

With vroom1374's suggestion of creating a new user account, I have solved the immediate problem and have resolved the contention in the family for the MacPro. With Hayne's input, I can now go back and take my time to figure out what's going on in the original account. I suspected there was something corrupted, but it never dawned on me to check the prefs,which I assumed got recreated when I reinstalled the Flash app. I'm so used to my Mac just working that I'm afraid I'm not as good of a troubleshooter as I think I am.