when using menuconfig to configure kernel, usually esc button is used to move one level up. in some cases with slow machines (this action is surprisingly slow) or over slow network it happens that esc is pressed repeatedly. when esc is pressed at the top level, a dialog asking wether kernel configuration should be saved is presented. the problem is, if at this moment esc is pressed, menuconfig just quits and no configuration is saved. also it's more reasonable to assume that esc at this moment would just dismiss this dalog and allow further editing. proposition: when esc is pressed at confirmation dialog, dismiss that dialog and leave user in menuconfig.
The way of getting one level up is to move to "exit" with the "->" key, not pressing escape.
In my lxdialog tree when pressing <ESC><ESC> on final dialog will get you back to the menu. Pressing a single <ESC> does not have any effect. The timeout that you see happens because ncurses used <ESC> to decide if a meta character has been pressed. This timeout has been removed in the lxdialog tree too. The lxdialog tree can be found at: www.kernel.org/git This bug will be kept open until this is in mainline - that will not happen until 2.6.19.
Fix is now in mainline - closed.