Y’all wash them? Really? I’d be very wary of willingly bringing water anywhere near a keyboard. I pop off the keys and scrub it down with dry Q-tips. The keys themselves are just plastic, so I’ll spray some Windex on a towel and rub them down if they’re dirty. It takes about an hour to do, but it’s something of a relaxing chore.
I’ve run plenty of keyboard through the dishwasher.
A couple of things are important.
Put the keyboard on the top shelf, with the keys facing down. Make sure you wrap the cord up so that it can’t fall down and get tangled in the dishwasher’s moving parts.
Don’t use soap. Some soaps are probably OK. Others will leave residue that makes the keyboard unusable. They come out squeaky clean without soap anyway, so don’t bother using it.
Dishwashers bake your dishes to dry them at the end. You need to turn off the heat drying cycle. Sometimes this is called “Power Saver Dry” or some such, and you have to turn it ON to turn the heat OFF (confusing, I know). If you don’t turn the heat off, sometimes you can melt the keyboard’s plastic, just like you can melt cups that aren’t dishwasher safe plastic.
Make sure you let the keyboard dry out for a couple of days.
Don’t do this with wireless keyboards or keyboards with fancy LCD displays in them.
For a keyboard that’s just dusty, I wouldn’t run it through the dishwasher. I’d just blow the dust out with compressed air. For a truly dirty keyboard (like someone spilled coffee in it and it doesn’t work any more) the dishwasher works wonders.
That’s some hardcore geekage right there… 
It’s pretty quick and easy and thorough to get dust out of a keyboard by hooding it upside down and vacuuming it with the brush attachment on your vacuum cleaner. Generally, having the most intense part of the airflow be a suction rather than an outgoing jet makes this method less likely to drive dust further into places you don’t want (though from other posts it sounds as if this is not a problem with keyboards).
Also, to remove key caps from a keyboard, get a tool made for pulling integrated circuit dual inline packages out of sockets. The tool looks like a heavy, wide pair of tweezers whose tips bend in and point at each other. Its purpose is to reach under both ends of an integrated circuit package, and grab it so you can pull it straight up. This is much easier to do, and much easier on the keys, than prying with a screwdriver. I’ve bought these tools for maybe $3 or so at Radio Shack (back when their core business wasn’t cell phones).
The safest and easiest way I found is a dampened one and a half inch paint brush. After wetting the bristles, dry them as much as blotting them can. Use the brush to clean into the key creases and across the top surfaces. This will clean normal keyboard dirt, but not something like tobacco tar or greasy residue. Buy a new keyboard in that case and mark it down to using a keyboard in hostile conditions.