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