For several months, after I installed Windows 7 at home I had a very annoying problem: whenever I was writing double quotes (“) or single quotes (‘) in some text editors and all browsers, the quotes did not appear. Only after I was typing another character, then both the opening and the closing quotes were shown, followed by the character (like “”X or ”X, instead of “X” or ‘X’). And when pressing some characters, like A or I, instead of getting “”A or “”I what was showing up was an Ä or Ï with two points on top. To get “X”, I had to type quote followed by space followed by X and then quote again. Really annoying.
The curious thing was that my environment was similar to the one I had at the office: Windows 7 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Office 2007, same browsers, etc. So I had to rule out a problem with Visual Studio. It must have been some weird setting in Windows 7, though I had done identical installations at home and at the office. Well, it turned out I didn’t have identical setups: at home I had both Romanian and English keyboard layouts, and for English I had both “US” and “United States-International”, the later being the default input language for the English layout.
Changing the default input language to English (United States) – US (as shown in the image above) solved this problem (without restarting Windows, only the applications where the problem occurred).
You can find this from Control Panel > Change Keyboard or other input methods > Keyboard and Languages > Change keyboards.
Interesting.
I met a analogous situation on my job workstation in a XP SP3 win32 OS.
Meantime, I changed the OS with XP x64 and I have no issues. Maybe, because now I’m using the same input language.
Thanks. Had the same problem after installing windows 7 and its been driving me nuts. Finally went hunting for a solution and found your blog. Changing from US international to US fixed it.
Wonder when they’ll bring out SP1 to fix what appear to be a fair few issues with windows 7 (just for me allone, changes to SAMBA have rendered my media gateways unusable and the backup utility can’t handle large disk capacities).
Thanks a lot for this solution. A friend and I both had the same issue. Both using Windows 7. The solution works like a charm!
Well… what could I say? thanks!
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I recently installed Windows7 and noticed this problem from the moment I tried to type something. In every text editor and browser the problem was the same. I said to myself that I’ll search later on Google a solution to this problem. It was getting very annoying when I was doing some stuff in C++ and had to work with strings or I had to print out something. Eh, I ignored the problem again(sometimes I’m very lazy). Now I find myself reading some posts of your blog and guess what? I find this nice post
Thanks again! and nice blog by the way…
Whew! Thankfully Google directed me here, since my workplace installed 64-bit Win7 i’ve been ripping my hair out… and like the guy above me (Ilea) i was a bit lazy to spend time researching the problem but i’m also writing C++/C# code and i use “” and ‘ a lot. Let’s just say i was very close to throwing my keyboard out the window.. so i guess i owe you a keyboard (or worth in beer
Thanks! Mersi mult, cum ar veni.
Thanks a mil dude, this was a pain in the ass issue for me. Keep up the good work.