In the battle sequence of the game, I am having a problem with how the program is accepting the keyboard input.
After selecting the option to Battle, the player gets the option to hit any of the attacks he/she chooses.
But, upon hitting the action-button, the first attack is automatically selected from “Battle” and you can’t at all choose your attack.
I’ve tried setting the program to sleep for a few hundred millisecs, but it doesn’t ‘like’ sleeping at this point in the game (i’ve had countless and unspecific glitches when using sleep).
Does anyone have any suggestions?
There is no way anyone could provide suggestions/help.
More information would be very useful. 
To help clarify, you have a menu, you select your choice and hit enter. However, it does work, it presses enter on the subsequently displayed screen as well.
sleep is definitely not the right direction for this scenario.
Can you post a snippet of your code showing you how you are grabbing your action button. Are you using keyPressed or KeyDown?
you need to either change the way input is grabbed or find a way to “consume” the key. Some ways are more right than others.
Maybe as a simple fix you can just reset all the input after the user selects Battle and when switching screens, that way none of the presses are carried over.