Weird keyboard error

This one had me completely stumped. I thought I'd seen it all when it comes to strange Windows XP errors.

I'm having trouble using my portuguese keyboard. The use of the portuguese keys that allow me to place accents on certain characters like 'a' or 'e'. When I hit one of these keys, two characters are written to the screen. Like this: ´´

Note that I just hit the key once and that is what happened. Under mormal operation, no character would be written. I would then hit the 'A' key and it would result in an accentuated 'a'.

What's weirder than this? Well, the fact that on the Windows Logon Screen, this doesn't happen. As it doesn't happen on a few input areas on a few programs. Everywhere else, including all sorts of editors, I'm having this problem.

Any ideas?

I know I have seen this problem before... a long time ago. It actually solved itself by installing all the updates from Windows Update.
I don't know much else than that, though.
Although, I too, would like to see a solution for this problem.

Is it an English XP installation? Have you played around with Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options?

gg

Yeah. It's an English installation and Regional and Language settings seem to be ok. Just like they were before the problem started.

Also, have all the current Windows Updates.

Try Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Advanced -> Language for non-Unicode programs.

gg

Good call. Had it set to English. But it didn't solve the problem.
It however prompted me to try something different with even weirder results.

If I remove the Portuguese keyboard from Regional Settings and logoff, then log back on and reinstall it, it works. But only until I shutdown the machine. After reboot, the problem surfaces again.

I have no virus, or indication of having one. Nothing like even remotely like that since my internet usage is pretty safe. Not to mention I keep updated version of my anti-virus and use a personal firewall.

Corrupted files?

Stab in the dark, but do you believe a system restore might help?
I my own view, those restore points vanish so quickly, that it is best to try it as soon as possible before the uncorrupted points are purged to make room for new.

Does it do that for every program (like notepad, wordpad, MS Word...) or just some programs? Maybe some of your programs don't handle Unicode?
Was it working before?

I guess I will have to try a system restore indeed. I was hoping to instead understand the problem.

It does this for every program with only very few exceptions; i.e. some textbox controls on a few applications. I cannot for instance use Firefox, IE, Word, Notepad ++, Visual Studio, ... normally

Well, I tried some more until I just gave up and went with the system restore, which did solve the problem. It's the first time I'm forced to do a system restore since SP2 came out.

So this issue goes unanswered. Probably some sort of file corruption.
And here they are finally: á à é è í ì ó ò ú ù ã õ â ê î ô û

Could it have been the keyboard driver? I know that ever since I had to reinstall my system, my pound key stopped working, which was becuase I had the basic driver rather than the extended one which the computer originally came with.