Altgr randomly stops working on windows 8

usually AltGr Works fine on my computer but latelly it stops working. I can still use Ctrl+Alt but it's a pain as I need it to write {} and I'm a c# programmer :S

Any idea on what can happen? If I reboot the laptop everything Works fine. It's not a failure of the key itself becasue when I press it the menus get the _ drawn, so the keyboard is sending the message to the OS.

Thanks in advance.

Solution 1:

There are many blog posts out there, which try to explain what the issue could be. Many times specific programs are the cause of the problem.

For me it was a Windows Remote Desktop connection I had running, that prevented the key from working. I didn't have to close it, just opening the window and clicking anywhere inside it somehow made my [AltGR] key work again!

EDIT: It seems to the related to the full-screen mode of RDP.

Just try to close all your applications one by one to find out what could be the cause.

Solution 2:

Here it turned out to be a running VirtualBox-instance that had tampered with my keyboard setup. After shifting focus to the VM and back to the editor the AltGr-key worked as expected.

I'm running Windows 7 SP1, so AltGr acting as Alt is a problem not only on Windows 8.