I've seen this too. But her "new" 486 was built sometime in 1996 (7?). She did find that on the Dos side of the system the keyboard rate was fine. So I have to believe that it's something to do with Linux.
From my old 286 onwards, every single motherboard I've owned, had the typmetic rate setting somewhere in the bios. It has settings for char/sec (from 6 to 30) and delay (250ms - 1sec), as well as enable/disable. Maybe it is disabled in your bios, or maybe Linux doesn't obey it, but I doubt, because mine is on and my rate is definitely slower than what the bios is set to.
On the Pentium classic I have lying around the rate is much faster than on my Celeron (typemetic rate is disabled). I suspect that if disabled, the rate might have been connected to the processor speed, and that that was changed as some time when processors became to fast. I might be completely wrong on this though. Hans == Book all your travel arrangements online from a selection of partners on Ananzi Travel. http://www.ananzi.co.za/cgi-bin/goto.pl?Travel