Game seemed to install fine but when I started it up none of the keyboard controls worked except Enter. Mouse worked though. Managed to get into the settings menu and it seemed to have defaulted to KB+M, but I was unable to change any settings anyway. So I shut the game down, did a bit of a search and didn't find anything. Decided to fire up the game again and it worked fine with KB+M.

This was a couple days ago. Last night I fired it up and again the KB inputs (other than Enter) did not work. Shut the game down, fired it up again and they worked. SO I played for an hour or so and then had to go do something else. Since you can't save wherever you want, I had to go back to find a save point, which meant I had to access the world map. Map flashed up and the game crashed (there goes a bunch of progress). Haven't tried firing it up again yet today. Anyone have any ideas what the issue may be with this game? I'm on WIn7 64 bit and have the game installed on a separate game drive (so not on C). I installed it as admin.

Obviously, I can reinstall, but would prefer not to if there's an easy solution that I'm overlooking.

I think reinstall would be your best option for control issues, though. Or try what it does with keyboard only setting. I have it set to Keyboard only and still my keyboard does work, my mouse too and I can even use controller if I want. I can even combine them in game without changing settings with no issues. And it sounds like weird problem.
Do you have another keyboard to try?
Maybe you can try to rebind keys to something else?

About the crash, have you done the usual stuff like updating your drivers.
Also, the game can be quite demanding on some PC, isn't there problem with overheating on yours? Maybe try lowering some setting? Vsync, post processing, Picture Quality to normal instead of high (the game says it increases requirements quite a lot).

If everything fails, you can try contacting the dev. IIRC, he was fairly active on FB and Twitter and people could turn to him for help.

You're not using some of third-party security suite like Comodo are you? One of Comodo's many facets is to prevent Xinput and DirectInput from accessing hardware through the game, so that it causes keyboard and gamepad controls to stop working.

If that's the case, you need to add the Dust executable as an exception/trusted file.

Also try running it as Administrator by right-clicking => Run as ..
Depending on this disk's access rights, it could cause these problems.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

Vitek: Tried Keyboard only but seems to have no effect. Drivers are up to date, and my PC even though it's a bit older, should be fine as far as system requirements. Core i7 920 CPU, 6 GB RAM, GTX 560ti.

Jamyskis: No third party antivirus. Just using MSE and Windows firewall. I do have an app that allows me to use the same KB+M with the two machines that I have networked together here (Synergy). Perhaps I'll try disabling it when I fire up the game next and see if that makes a difference.

DeMignon: I do run it as admin. No difference.

Thanks again for the responses, and feel free to suggest anything else that may come t mind. I appreciate it.

Anyway, I played for another hour or so this morning and while I still get the issue of the keyboard not working first time I start it up, a restart always seems to fix it. No crashes or issues when accessing the world map this time. I'll keep plugging along and hopefully can get through without having to abort and reinstall.

Dust works just fine here and I do use the Comodo firewall.

Nope. Just KB+M.

Marking this as the solution, as it got me pointed in the right direction. I was thinking about what may affect the keyboard/mouse operation in the game and this got me thinking of my home network. The culprit was Synergy, the program I use to allow me to control both my PCs in my network with one keyboard and mouse. When I play, all I need to do is shut Synergy down first and everything works smoothly.

Thanks everyone for the replies, and thanks DeMignon for pointing me in the right direction.