I have a HP Pavilion 6040 and recently my shift keys stopped working. They won't capitalzie words or give the symbols in numbers. After pressing the shift key a bunch of times it will finally start to work again. Even when it works the right shift key won't respond to any of the letters on the 3rd row of the keyboard, 3rd row from bottom starting with qwer. Does anyone know of a software problem that could cause this or shoudl I RMA back to HP?

Backup the things you want to keep and install your OS again.
If that doesn´t help RAM it to HP indeed.

Take the keyboard out, turn it over, and hit the reverse side sharply several times.

You'll be surprised how much crap accumulates under the keys.

Maybe it was just a dirt particle or something wedged in the contacts.