Touch Pro Keyboard problem?

[mharvey]

I just got my Touch Pro and I seem to have a problem with my phone unless I am misunderstanding how the keyboard is supposed to work.

When I try to write an email or a text message using the slide out keyboard I see the screen rotate and the keyboard backlight activate... for about a second. Then the screen flips back, the keypad backlight goes out and the hard buttons (home, back, talk, end) light up. It stays this way for about a second and then flips back again. It will keep flipping back and forth continuously as long as I have the keyboard out. As soon as I close the keyboard everything flips back to normal.

This makes the keyboard all but unusable. Am I doing something wrong here? Is there a setting somewhere that could be causing this or do I have a bad phone?