Windows 7 Quotes Problem

by

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.

52 thoughts on “Windows 7 Quotes Problem”

  1. 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. 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).

  4. 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. 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 😉

  9. 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.

  13. 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.

  16. 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!

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

  25. 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 😉

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

  34. Have a problem with windows 7.

    I see this in both explorer and volume control.

    seems that in vol. when I try to adjust volume, and I leave the pointer on the icon, the vol. control drops down to zero.
    I can control the vol. using the function keys.

    With explorer, if I have the window not at max screen (don’t know what you call that) the screen shifts to the far right. I drag it back to the left and it shift back to far right again.

    Please help
    poncho

  41. Pingback: Uvozovky ve Windows 7 | jenovo

  48. This started happening on my PC this week. I don’t recall installing any new app so I guess this setting change “came in” with some Win update.

    Anyway, removing the international layout as you described helped it. Thanks!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.