I must have fat-fingered or random clicked with the mouse on screen. Now in Emacs the ctrl and meta keys no longer function.

I hold down ESC and type % and expect text replacement to come. But instead I get a % in my edit screen.

Same with CTRL-S and expect to type the search character(s) but the character is typed into the edit window.

How do I revert back to expected usage? I don't have any keymapping changes in .emacs.

This is GUI Emacs 24.3.1 in Redhat linux 7.9

I know the canonical recommendation is to reboot but this is a VM on a remote server provisioned by CAD in the workplace.

This is only new today in the VM window (nomachine). Behavior is perfectly normal in host (windows OS)