I came into my office today to find that my keyboard would no longer type capital letters. The shift, caps lock, and even num lock keys seemed to be broken. After a quick WTF it was pointed out to me that VMWare occasionally does this to Linux machines. Thanks to Matt who showed me a quick solution. In a terminal just type:
setxkbmap
And everything should be back to normal. After using VMWare on Linux for a couple of years I’ve never encountered this problem!