Jan
15

Windows 7 Quotes Problem

Marius Bancila Windows 2010-01-15

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.

Keyboard input

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.

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Address: http://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2010/01/15/windows-7-quotes-problem/
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31 comments untill now

  1. Gravatar
    Sly @ 2010-01-16 15:12

    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.

  2. Gravatar
    steve batten @ 2010-01-23 01:54

    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).

  3. Gravatar
    Michael @ 2010-03-10 18:39

    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!

  4. Gravatar
    Ilea Cristian @ 2010-04-11 22:24

    Well… what could I say? thanks!
    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…

  5. Gravatar
    glenneroo @ 2010-04-20 15:47

    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 ;)

  6. Gravatar
    alex @ 2010-07-09 06:37

    Thanks! Mersi mult, cum ar veni.

  7. Gravatar
    boyan @ 2010-07-23 12:34

    Thanks a mil dude, this was a pain in the ass issue for me. Keep up the good work. :)

  8. Gravatar
    vali @ 2010-08-30 12:23

    that’s the fix but also check this out : http://www.w7forums.com/keyboard-quotes-problem-t1367.html

  9. Gravatar
    vasó @ 2010-09-22 15:12

    Thank you so much!!!!

    I am a developer, and gained a brand new laptop, with win7.

    You can imagine, how much wasted time was it to me, to fix the f****ng special chars.

    You know, i should type $a = ‘abc’; and similar things, and it did drive me crazy!

    You just saved my life! Thanks again.

  10. Gravatar
    Pushpinder @ 2010-10-11 11:04

    Thanks! I also had the same problem and now solved using your instructions.

  11. Gravatar
    milwa @ 2010-11-05 02:51

    Thank you. Helped a lot :)

  12. Gravatar
    ikonmx @ 2010-11-19 21:07

    Thanks a lot. This problem was driving me nuts

  13. Gravatar
    Rich @ 2010-11-21 19:18

    My control panel doesn’t have a ” Change Keyboard or other input methods”. I found that dialog above by

    Start > Devices and Printers > Right click keyboard > Region and Language > Change Keyboards

    For some reason I had “US – International” and also a couple of Polish services in there – no idea how they got there, I installed my computer from scratch and never did any work with Polish.

    Thanks for the tip though, this is a real puzzler, and in Visual Studio at least, intermittent. I’d thought it was a VS or Resharper problem.

  14. Gravatar
    funky @ 2010-12-29 01:43

    Kewl!

    Same goes – was driving me crackers!

    FIXED.

    Many thanks

  15. Gravatar
    funky @ 2010-12-29 01:44

    Er.. forgot to add:

    I followed Rich’s version too. Thanks also to Rich

  16. Gravatar
    Roger @ 2010-12-29 21:54

    In my case, it was already set to English (United States) – US, so I temporarily changed it to something else and then changed it back. Restarted my apps and – voila – problem solved. Thanks!

  17. Gravatar
    daniel @ 2011-01-27 18:16

    Mersi mult!
    Mia mers un timp aceasta pe nervi, pana nu am decis sa googlez 1 min :)

  18. Gravatar
    pety @ 2011-02-08 06:46

    Thanks o lot! In sfarsit bine ca am ajuns pe site-ul asta dastept.

  19. Gravatar
    gingo @ 2011-03-07 13:27

    Many Thanks!

  20. Gravatar
    Majo @ 2011-04-18 14:19

    Thank you :)

  21. Gravatar
    Simon Says @ 2011-04-27 14:01

    Ohhh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

  22. Gravatar
    Babybug @ 2011-05-20 14:59

    Thanks! So much better now :D

  23. Gravatar
    Cosmin @ 2011-06-01 12:20

    I have the following problem: sometimes, when I try to write some value in a property box (for example a width box in InDesign)in different programs, a quote is inserted automatically. Does anyone know how to stop this function?

  24. Gravatar
    Darius Tulbure @ 2011-06-16 09:25

    Thank you very much for this article. It helped me solve this irritating and strange problem :)

  25. Gravatar
    Brendan @ 2011-08-18 06:52

    Thanks a lot, this solved the problem for me as well. However as I am in Australia I had “English (Australia) – US” as the default input language and “English (Australia)” as the keyboard type. Removing “US – International” did not fix the problem until I added a new installed service for an “English (United States)” keyboard with only “US” underneath.

    Strange and weird little bug but its fixed now. Sorry for all the “” but I am just enjoying being able to type them again ;)

  26. Gravatar
    Lica Dunca @ 2011-09-04 10:53

    Thanks, for this solution. It was driving me crazy.

  27. Gravatar
    Hesham Nassar @ 2011-10-07 08:43

    I tried it & its work fine now.
    Good job Marius for the solution :)
    Best wishes,,,

  28. Gravatar
    Scott Collier @ 2011-10-12 15:51

    Thank you!!! This problem was really annoying.

  29. Gravatar
    Ian @ 2011-10-23 16:52

    Thanks for that!
    Works fine now.
    Saved me a lot of bother!

  30. Gravatar
    Nenad @ 2011-12-14 10:17

    Thank U soooo much !!! All the best.

  31. Gravatar
    Val Dragu @ 2012-01-13 20:56

    Thanks! (Multumesc!)
    This has been bothering me for quite a while. Now that I solved it, I feel so much better.

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