On the subject of keyboards and monitors:
Obviously I have a KVM. The ability to switch without re-cabling is a boon. I might have touched a rack-mount in my time. (-:
But the #RaspberryPi bootstrap's initial stages are very sensitive to KVMs. If the monitor is not "there" when the GPU checks for it, it will proceed without a display.
Likewise, a #USB HID keyboard that is behind a hub, which is how KVMs mainly make things look to hosts, is tricky.
I'm also seeing a problem with strange phantom keypresses, the investigation of which I'm postponing. The current suspect is that this is a "Multimedia" keyboard with 2 interfaces on the bus, the 2nd handling the consumer and system page keycodes. It might be something else entirely, though.