Over time Liferea users did report the broken key widget cycling. The symptom was that the focus always got stuck in the item list. Now Simon Lipp provided a quite simple patch that fixes the problem. The cause was a wrong "return TRUE" instead of a "return FALSE" in the main window key handler. Argh...
Well starting with 1.6.1 and 1.7.2 our keyboard users should be happy again. I know that this was frustrating to some of you!