I have a new asus laptop running XP pro. But whenever I press **shift 2 ** I get " not @ (and converse for shift '). I tried changing the regional language settings as that affects some keys (eg. $) but to no avail. The **2 ** and **’ ** keys work fine. Obviously I am coping having written this but it is annoying. Any ideas? Is there a keyboardmap somewhere in the system or shareware that would help?
Sounds like your keyboard mapping is set to UK rather than US.
To change it, Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Details > Installed Services. (Intuitive, no?) You probably have two (or more) options in this panel (each with their own square blue box with “EN” in it), one of which should have “US” under “Keyboard”. See what this option is called (the name in bold type next to the “EN” box, and select this as the default option in the combo box at the top of the window.
If you don’t have “US” under “Keyboard”, click on the “Add” button, and select “US” under “Keyboard Layout”.
It worked Tevildo! Thanks for the amazingly quick reply. Thank you too Bill Gates for making computers so user friendly :smack:
No problem. 
One additional point - make sure that you set the default layout to US, otherwise it’ll revert back to UK all the time; certainly when you reboot, and there are quite a few applications (FireFox, for one) that set the keyboard layout back to the default whenever they open.