Lost a night of online play due to a POS software Comcast distributes called Constant Gurard. One feature of the hackware remaps the keyboard to thwart keystroke mining. In Brink it's a disaster. I assume Brink addresses HW / IRQ in some form and as a result the remapped keystrokes do not get interprutted correctly.

After isolating and removing Constant Guard, the game functioned properly.

Thought someone else might be looking for a solution over time so posting up what I did to fix my issue.