Windows XP " problem

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine (poor guy) has a new laptop running Windows XP. The problem is with double quote marks: " " in Word.

Whenever you press a double quote, the quote-mark doesn’t actually appear, until you press a space. This is damn irritating, because you might not want to press space. I tried turning smart-quotes off, but it still does it with plain quotes.

I have never come across such a thing ever before on any computer or piece of Windows/Microsoft software, what the hell is it, and how to get rid of it?

Any ideas?

2

You don’t need to press space. Just any other character key will do.

3

I’m running Word 2002 on Windows XP.
I type a double quote and it appears immediately.

I’m thinking your friend has some kind of keyboard option set that allows certain characters to be entered by combinations of other characters (like back-slash followed by letter e would be converted to e-grave) Perhaps double quote is one of first characters of a two character pair (maybe double quote followed by U becomes u-umlaut). In that case this intermediary would not release the double-quote keystroke event to Word until it was sure the next character did not complete one of the special codes.

Does it happen on Notepad as well?

4

Not sure - I will test Notepad for him.

He definitely wouldn’t knowingly have set up any keyboard options (he wouldn’t even know how to - real tech-newbie) plus no one else has used the laptop except him and me.

Will post back with results.

5

Check the keyboard settings under control panel. If you have something other than US 101, that is it.

6

Argh, I posted a reply to this yesterday, but my net connection died at an inopportune moment and it went into the bit bucket… so here goes again…

Basically my experience with this has been that a Regional/Language setting has been changed and the default language is something other than whatever’s appropriate in your region (English - USA, most likely).

Go to the control panel, Regional and Language Options, click Languages, then Details. You may see extra languages loaded here and more than likely not the default.

Also, you may see a blue square with two white letters in the system tray indicating an extra language is loaded…

Hope this helps,
Max.

7

Ah - that’s very likely to be it. We tried to change the laptop to UK English - to avoid alerts every time “colour” was spelled correctly :wink: - so that’s probably what’s been done. I’ll try and swap it back.

8

It’s not the language setting. It will have to be the keyboard setting.

But the UK language setting might default to “international.”