Here are the two links and code corrections that seemed to solve my problems (so far anyway) with the Raspbian and Kodi implementation above. http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/27077/kodi-xbmc-on-raspbian-cant-activate-keyboard-or-mouse http://forum.freetronics.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=5...

If you hold down the Ctrl-Alt-F1 keys on your keyboard, you will return to the shell that is active on tty1.