I'm using Ubuntu 12.10 and found that after about 20 minutes of work that my mouse and keyboard became very unresponsive. So I found the following fix:

sudo -i

To test if this is the problem:

echo N> /sys/module/drm_kms_helper/parameters/poll

To make the fix permanent:

echo "options drm_kms_helper poll=N">/etc/modprobe.d/local.conf

It appears that the fix does work, but what does this do? Am I breaking something else in doing this?