This isn't really a post about Colemak (which I've tried briefly but not attempted to learn) but I'm curious whether anyone has similar experiences.  I've been using QWERTY all my life, since I was a kid, taking touch typing both in middle school and high school and clocking serious hours typing online for pretty much my life.

I've been using TypingMaster Pro to learn a custom layout of mine.  Even though its lessons are designed for QWERTY I still prefer this program to any others I've tried, and I wish amphetype would check out this program and make a TypingMaster-like mode.  I pretty much do 1-3 lessons a day, and I've spent about 6 hours total doing this by now, although on two different computers, so I haven't completed the full "basic" course yet, just got through half of it on two different machines.  I've found that this program runs fine in Wine, although I currently am using Vista on both machines, as they aren't mine.  In the lessons, depending on which exercise, my WPM with the new layout ranges from 20-40, whereas my QWERTY speed was and remains 100+.

Here's what's strange.  I tried another typing program, a web one, that makes you type simple letters in difficult orders.  I am finding this quite difficult to do with QWERTY, because I frequently hit the key from my new layout instead.  I can still type natural words and language in QWERTY without a problem, but when I'm not "flowing" words and natural language, I am a bit confused, even though when practicing my layout I am able to avoid this.

So I've kind of damaged my QWERTY mastery, but can still type words just fine.  Anyone else run into this in their process of learning Colemak or other layouts?  I don't intend to switch to one layout, but to be able to type in QWERTY and other layout(s) as well.  But the basic typing drills of QWERTY are now a bit challenging for me, even though big words and paragraphs are still easy and incredibly fast.