system
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Thanks for your patience.
Incredibly, the USB keyboard is being recognized by the drive scanner AND NOW by avast!.
I can only assume that my ECS K7S5A motherboard (one that has a tendency to suffer BIOS amnesia from time to time) finally recognized the USB keyboard in DOS-mode.
Everything works as it should. :-\
I appreciate the help and am glad this problem has “healed” itself 