I finally managed to track down this problem. ThinkPad laptops have a BIOS setting to make Num Lock independent for the internal keyboard and any external keyboard. This setting allows enabling Num Lock on an external keyboard with a real numpad, while leaving it disabled on the internal keyboard where the "numpad" just remaps existing keys and prevents normal typing.
With this setting enabled, a ThinkPad has two independent numlock settings. When I plugged in an external keyboard, I found that it had Num Lock enabled. (I noticed rather quickly, because I used an external ThinkPad keyboard, with the same numpad overlay that prevents normal typing.) Once I turned off the external Num Lock, gnome-screensaver stopped warning about enabled Num Lock. Having the external Num Lock enabled causes gnome-screensaver to warn about Num Lock, even with no external keyboard attached. I don't know the ideal fix for this problem. In an ideal world, gnome-screensaver could know whether any particular keyboard has an overlay numpad or similar that would break typing a password with Num Lock on, and would warn iff the user has Num Lock enabled on such a keyboard and tries to type their password. However, I seriously doubt that such a keyboard database exists. In the absence of that, it would at least help to note *which* Num Lock the user has enabled when warning about it. I'll report this upstream and try to get a conversation going. - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org