My punctuation randomly turns into accent symbols
 

So I'm having this really bizarre issue. Occasionally, without any command of any kind, my computer will just up and decide that some of my punctuation keys are now for accents and symbols. My question marks, for instance, become that backwards E with an accent over it. It happens frequently, and I'm getting rather annoyed.

I've had it on both Linux and Windows with this computer, and it doesn't matter what program I'm using. However it only affects individual programs. If I restart the program, it will go away. It will hit multiple programs at once, but it affects them all invidually, dig?

Anyone heard of this? I can't really google it because the terms have too broad a meaning, and just get me thousands of pages I have no interest in.

Sounds like something might be randomly switching your keyboard nationality. :brow:

Unless you are adding language-specific settings in both?
 

Came with the computer, but it's pretty much the most basic possible keyboard you can have. The main thing though, is that I haven't noticed any particular keys being hit before it happens. I've been trying to watch myself, but there's no consistency to when it comes and goes.

It's the weirdest damn thing.

like confirming if it is the keyboard or not
 

Yeah, I guess I'll pick up another. It's what I was gonna do anyway. I just wanted to look for obvious solutions first. Thanks.

I turn my old keyboards into bird-toys, so it's all good.

I have this same problem on my laptop except instead of random punctuation marks, Japanese.

Or Chinese maybe I guess? It's not like I would know.

Do you have multiple keyboard layouts set up? It kind of sounds like you do -- I have a regular keyboard layout and a Spanish keyboard layout set-up and I can toggle between them -- however, the layout change doesn't happen for all programs. Like... right now I have Firefox and Notepad open. Right now, while in Firefox, I just switched my layout to Spanish. But going back to Notepad, it's still United States English. And... if I restart the program, it goes back to default, United States English. And although I change my layout by clicking a button on my taskbar, it can be set up to use a keyboard shortcut, so yeah.

It doesn't quite seem to make sense that it seems to be a cross-OS problem, but you might want to double-check that to be sure? In both OSes.

Also, just out of curiosity (I really don't expect this to help), what does Device Manager call your keyboard?