Spurious 'u' characters generated on dell laptop

I have a fairly old (about 4 years) dell laptop. I'm not sure as to the exact model but it's one of the cheaper ones that came with windows 7 on it.

At some point, seemingly after I loaded a lot of things like vim, cygwin, python, etc., on it it started to generate spurious characters, specifically 'u' very readily.

For example, when I was typing 'Windows 7' up above (and since then) I got 'u7' twice and '7u' once before I could just get plain '7' and nothing else.

I thought this was purely a windows issue, so I now have a dual boot on the machine with windows 7 and fedora. I usually use the fedora and still have the same problem.

I'm not the world's greatest typist, but this doesn't happen on any other keyboard and it seems I get these phantom 'u' characters even when I try to specifically avoid hitting u at all.

I also don't remember this problem occurring when I first got the machine.

Since I use vi/vim I'd often get entire blocks of text suddenly disappearing before I realized I was sending a stream of unwanted undos.

Has anyone else experienced such a problem?

Thanks.