keybord does not work with boot selection

grub inherits the BIOS keyboard-support i believe, by default ubuntu should be the default selection and should boot, however it is still important to be able to interact with it which will be available if you plug in a PS/2 keyboard into your computer, unless you computer has embedded usb and instead you are plugging your keyboard into a PCI/PCI-E or otherwise add-on usb card this will most likely be the only way to interact with grub.

My older coputer is like this but my newer computer will support my usb keyboard, hopefully you have another keyboard around or doing dual boot wil be impossible or a real pain.

My computer is about one and a half year old and has no PS/2 connections. It only has USB ports. I have windows as the default selection.

I had the same issue. My keyboard is a Microsoft wireless unit that allows me to connect via the PS/2 port - I was using usb connections. Changed to PS/2 port - problem solved.
Probably doesn't help you since you don't have a PS/2 connection.

Doesnt seems like it does but if it has PS/1 port then plug in a keyboard to that.
You can use the live cd to change the menu.1st to make ubuntu default or you can create a boot floppy or cd to boot into it and keep windows easily botable
To restore the xp bootloader use your xp cd.

Lilo might have better support but but unlikely and i do not recommend it.

you should rely instead on whatever your bios options are to choose boot device (presumable that is how you installed)

This is how i booted my last system so os's were independant from differnt drive, however you must have to have 2 different devices with two differnt boot loaders.

If ubuntu is installed on another drive this is easy, install grub/ubuntu to this other drive (if you remove the windows hard-drive you can make grub have no menu, you can also remove/change the menu by editing the /boot/grub/menu.1st file on your ubuntu partition)

So there does not seem to be a solution for my problem. And I want to keep windows my default, because I use some windows based software which I use a lot.

I said there was a solution for your problem. First, however, you should reset you boot loader with the windows one by using the windows xp cd.

Then you can use linux live cd to make a bootable grub floppy disk, or if you dont have a floppy and instead have a usb flash disk or ever a cd, you can make a boot loader that works from there that defaults to your linux install. If the linux install is on a differnt hard drive it will be also, and probably preferrable to do it by having the linux loader on that hard drive and using the bios selection you used to select the live cd in the first place