Visual Studio appears to randomly adopt American keyboard layout

Gah! This is really causing me hassle today. Suddenly without warning '@' (at symbol) and '"' (double quote) are trading places on my keyboard but ONLY in Visual Studio 2008!

I can't seem to find anything in help or online to explain/remedy this. Is there some keyboard shortcut I am inadvertently executing?

I rebooted my PC and it went away for an hour or two and then suddenly came back.

Oh, the insanity :(

Solution 1:

I have tried the same thing, but it turned out to be because I was hitting Alt+Shift in certain programs, thus triggering the language switch in Windows.

Could it be that you accidentally hit Alt+Shift or Ctrl+Shift (British layout) when coding?

Solution 2:

This is Windows itself changing the keyboard layout - it's not really anything to do with Visual Studio, but it happens when you're using Visual Studio because the key combinations you use when tying in code are similar to the default key combinations Windows XP uses for switching keyboard layouts in the fly.

These instructions are for disabling keyboard layout switching in Windows XP. It's similar in other versions of Windows:-

• Go into control panel and select Regional And Language Options.
• Then on the Languages tab hit the Details button.
• On the dialog that pops up, on the Settings tab, hit the Keyboard button at the bottom of it.
• On the "Advanced Key Settings" box that pops up, select the other languages one by one and uncheck the key sequence options.
• OK it all out and you're free from frustration :)