In missions, I can only turn my character for about 1 second before it locks in the direction it's facing. I can turn if I need to by pressing esc, moving the mouse so I'll be facing the desired direction, pressing esc, and quickly moving the mouse a bit before my character locks in place again. in Haven (and in the rescue camp before), I can turn for about 3 seconds before I no longer can.
The arrow keys don't work to change my direction at all. Every other aspect of the game I've tried seems to work, just not turning.
I'm running on Debian and this issue occurs in the icedtea 6 java plugin, openjdk 7, and sun's java 8. I've tried adding the XMODIFIERS bit to my spiral file in case that was the problem, since it seemed to be a similar issue, but it didn't help.

computer details:
1680x1050 display
1.8GHz processor
ATI mobility radeon x1600 256MB video memory
1GB RAM

After finding this post (which exactly describes my issue), I attempted to run the game on IceWM instead of xfce4 but still no luck. Has anyone got this game running properly on a debian-based system?

EDIT: I fixed it by unsetting the gamepad "strafe" control.
As a side note, I love how fast support is to respond :3