Here’s an interesting little problem I encountered the other day. Your keyboard starts behaving strangely – for example pressing the ‘ apostrophe key doesn’t seem to work, but following it with a letter produces a strange foreign character. I was writing some code in a basic text editor, and it was driving me nuts when [‘i’] was ending up as [Ã’]
Turns out this is due to a special keyboard type in Windows called International English. There are five modifier keys ` ‘ ” ~ ^ which modify the display of the following character.
Somehow this ‘feature’ kept activating itself (maybe a key combination?) You can remove it by switching your keyboard language to US/UK English (or your local equivalent).
I always find the Keyboard Language control tool in a slightly odd place in WIndows. It’s not under Control Panel > Keyboard (Why on earth not?). It’s under Regional and Language Options, in the Languages tab and press the Details button.
Once I’d found the cause of the irritation in Google, I ended up at http://www.starr.net/is/type/kbh.html