New Lenovo X240 - Keyboard sometimes pauses / disconnects and resumes

Just bought a Lenovo X240 off of someone for a really, really good deal. Tested it at the time of purchase and it was fine.

Then bam, I noticed that when I type, the keyboard would eventually stop working or pause. Pressing the keys repeatedly does nothing, then eventually it'll come back and I can type again. Sometimes it is so erratic that it disconnects and reconnects multiple times. Sometimes I wouldn't even get any keys to work at all except for function keys for like a minute straight. Did notice that gently slapping the right side of the keyboard would make it work but only temporarily.

Interestingly, during this entire post, the keyboard worked without fai.... until now. Yep, it just stopped working for 8 seconds and then it came back.

Any ideas whether it's an actual physical problem? Is this a known issue with the X240? I am certain it is fixable. The laptop is physically very clean with no signs of spillage or crud.

Don't know if it's related but when I upgraded my Thinkpad x61s to Windows 8.1 Pro it experienced intermittent freezes of the whole system when plugged into wired LAN (WIFI was fine). Had to disable Message-Signaled Interrupts in the registry for the NIC to fix the issue. Keep in mind your device ID may be different.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1049&SUBSYS_20DE17AA&REV_03\3&21436425&0&C8\Device Parameters\Interrupt Management\MessageSignaledInterruptProperties]
"MSISupported"=dword:00000000

I have one, never experienced this, but I would say make sure all of the Lenovo trackpoint drivers are installed.

Using exclusively wireless connection so I am not sure if I should bother with the registry editing. I am running Windows 7 Enterprise.
Reinstalled drivers including Lenovo trackpoint drivers and keyboard drivers.
Used it all day yesterday with no problems. I hit one point where the keyboard stopped working for 10 seconds... and then it resumed.
Will continue testing.