Problems using external keyboard

I spilled beer on my macbook and now the keyboard will not work. It turns on and the track pad works but no keyboard.

I want to use an external USB keyboard while I am waiting on a new top case. Problem is that pressing ALT on the external keyboard can not get the macbook to boot to Leopard. It keeps booting to the windows bootcamp partition.

I tried to remove the windows partion using bootcamp but can not do that using my wife's macbook and an external drive.

Leopard boots fine from an external.

Any ideas on how to use the external keyboard?
Any ideas on how to salvage the existing keyboard? (removed it, washed it, dryed it, reinstalled, nothing but power button and trackpad work.
Any ideas on how to remove the windows partition?

Thanks.

Spilling beer on your keyboard is going to result in more than just having to replace the keyboard and top case. Beer is very corrosive and has probably gotten onto your logic board and who knows where else. From your post it appears that there is damage to other components. You may be looking at having to replace the logic board which is very expensive.

Please read the sticky at the head of the forum regarding spills.

Regards.

Try another keyboard. My cheap 10$ keyboard works fine when pressing Alt to select booting Windows/OSX.