Sorry for the trouble.  I think I've got it - it turns out I had no
.emacs file.  As soon as I made one and put some unrelated preferences
into it (relating to common lisp or inferior lisp) the weird key
behavior went away.  What a relief!
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Jane and Carl Trachte [mailto:janencarl@aznex.net] 
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 8:05 PM
To: 'help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org'
Subject: Single space movement for key press in editor
 
Hello.
I've been happily using EMACS for about 8 months now, mostly as a code
editor for C, LISP, and SQL.  It's worked great on Windows and Linux, so
much so that I'm hooked.  Recently I loaded Mandrake 9.2 Linux on my
Linux partition, replacing Red Hat 8 (the computer is an HP Pavillion,
Pentium 4 processor).  The EMACS installation that came with Mandrake
has keys that only work once when you hold them down (if I type in C-n,
holding both keys down, the cursor stops and waits for me to press C-n
again to move down another line).  Is this something that can be
controlled by setting a variable in the .Emacs file or is it a quirk of
the OS?  Thanks in advance for helping out a newb.
CBT