For months now I’ve been struggling with an issue, where at seemingly random intervals, my keymap would get all scrambled up. Instead of a question mark, an E with an accent would be typed. Normal single quotes turned into backticks, etc.  Very frustrating.  The problem would persist in an application until I closed and reopened it.  With no idea what was causing it, and such a painful fix, I spent some time Googling and have discovered the cause and solution.

My Windows Vista system had a French Canadian keymap installed.  A keyboard shortcut to toggle keymaps must be getting accidentally pressed.

The Fix

1. Open up the Control Panel
2. Select ‘Regional and Language Options’
3. Select the ‘Keyboards and Languages’ tab
4. Press the ‘Change Keyboards’ button
5. Select any keymaps you don’t want.  
6. Click Apply, problem solved!

Unless you regularly switch languages your system should only have one keymap installed.

In the same area of the Control Panel on the Advanced Key Settings tab I discovered a keyboard shortcut for ‘Left-Alt + Shift’ that was part of my problem.  Altering the keyboard shortcut would fix the issue here as well, although deleting the extra keymaps was my preferred solution.

I ran across a website tonight that would give me scrambled output when I pulled it down with cURL.  Where I was expecting to see html content, I was instead getting what looked like a binary file.  (Try running ‘cat’ on a jpg and you’ll see what I mean).

What exactly was happening, and how did I fix it? 

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