Dear *.* I have finally solved my problem with Japanese character input, reported here 2 weeks ago. Since the same problem may happen to other users, I will shortly describe the reason and the solution. For various reasons I had reconfigured my keyboard layout using (among others) the following commands in ~/.Xmodmap: clear mod1 clear mod3 clear mod4 keycode 64 = Alt_L Meta_L keycode 117 = Mode_switch Meta_R add mod1 = Meta_L add mod1 = Meta_R add mod3 = Alt_L add mod4 = Mode_switch In SuSE Linux 8.1 these commands lead to the following modifier bindings (see "xmodmap -pm") which looked and worked well: mod1 Meta_L (0x40) Meta_R (0x75) mod2 Num_Lock (0x4d) mod3 Alt_L (0x40) mod4 Mode_switch (0x75) mod5 Scroll_Lock (0x4e) But in SuSE Linux 9.0, the "add" command was interpreted in a different way, and the modifier bindings became: mod1 Alt_L (0x40) Mode_switch (0x75) mod2 Num_Lock (0x4d) mod3 Alt_L (0x40) mod4 Mode_switch (0x75) mod5 Scroll_Lock (0x4e) Obviously, this does not look correct any more because the Alt_L and Mode_Switch functions operate several modifier bits each and because the mod1 bit is operated by two different functions. Through some channels which I do not understand, this lead to a loss of information when characters were transferred from kinput/canna to KDE-based programs. Since I have deleted the Meta_L/R entries from my keycode lines and deleted the "add mod1" lines, Japanese input is working correctly. Michael Herrmann