Strange visual studio 2008 behavior when pressing keys

Question

Every once in a while I'll do something that causes strang behavior when pressing certain keys.

1)The single quote key (') will not type a character unless I press it twice, in which case it will print two backwards single quote characters (`).
2)The (backwards single quote?) key types a # character.
3)The angle bracket keys (< and >) type a single quote (') and a period (.).
4)Shift + any A-Z character types the character and brings the code completion window up.

I'm sure there's other symptomps, and they only want I've found to stop it is to restart Visual studio. This behavior does not appear in any other apps. Anybody experience this?

Answer 1

You probably have an alternate input language set up (try typing ` a when this happens and you'll get à). I think the default hotkey to switch between input languages is Ctrl+Shift, so you're probably hitting it by accident occasionally. Use the language settings control panel to turn off the hotkey or remove the unwanted keyboard configuration.

Answer 2

I have a laptop/keyboard which can be used for French-Canadian. Alternative key-meanings are printed on some keys (in green) ... and they match the keys you mentioned, i.e.:

• alt of ' is ``
• alt of ` is #
• alt of < and > are ' and .

I have an edition of Vista installed that knows about French-Canadian. On the right-hand end of the O/S Taskbar, near the clock, there's a keyboard icon. It's usually set to "US but if I set it to "Canadian French" then I get the key mappings you describe.

Something similar (i.e. changing the language-specific interpretation of the keyboard) must be happening on your machine too. You say it's in Visual Studio, but for me I find it in my O/S.

Answer 3

I started getting this on my computer (not in Visual Studio, but everywhere else). I had default input language set to "English(New Zealand) - United States-International", whatever that is supposed to mean. Changed it to English-US. Disabled the "Language Bar"

"Control Panel >> Regional Settings >> Languages, click on Advanced, look at Installed Services. See if you have multiple choices - if you have an "International" option, remove it and I believe the problem will go away. It did for me.

AFAIK, this happened when I installed XP-SP3.

Answer 4

If you have multiple languages on your machine, then you probably triggered this behavior by pressing ctrl+shift, which causes windows to switch the system language for the active window.

You can either press it again, or better yet, disable the language bar and all other secondary languages.

Answer 5

Like others have said, you can press ctrl-shift to "loop" through the settings.