text hold up in max

hello world!
I have been having a strange problem lately with the keyboard input into max. Somewhat randomly max will stop accepting input from the keyboard!? This is effecting editing objects, text input, and key triggers. sometimes typing some text in somewhere outside of max (like in the finder) and then going back will fix the problem, however sometimes only relaunching max fixes the problem. I dunno if this is a known issue or if anyone has any solutions for this problem, but if you know how to fix this let me know! Its mainly an issue for me when performing live when i need to trigger presets from the keyboard.
I know of a few other people who have been having this problem lately but I havent really seen any posts about it.

MacBPro
OSX 10.6.4
2.4 GHz Intel C2D
2GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT
Max Version 5.1.5