I just had the keyboard fail to send a "zero" from the keypad, the "zero" on the Kbd worked.
Sounds like numlock is off.

My mouse shuts off after a while, so it's okay to leave it on overnight, etc. Numlock-on-boot seems to be hard for Linux generally, not just Knoppix, but as you said - it's not such a big deal (unless you forget to turn it on.) It seems to me that, it being a catch-up game for non-Windows OSs, there'd be some effort put in to make the easy, surface-only stuff the same so people won't be put off. How hard can it be to make the "Super" key (^ on the left side of the space bar) open the main menu? When I have some spare time to fool with such...

Cheers!
Krishna