Visual Studio appears to randomly adopt American keyboard layout

Question

I have tried the same thing, but it turned out to be because I was hitting Alt+Shift in certain programs, thus triggering the language switch in Windows.

Could it be that you accidentally hit Alt+Shift or Ctrl+Shift (British layout) when coding?

This is Windows itself changing the keyboard layout - it's not really anything to do with Visual Studio, but it happens when you're using Visual Studio because the key combinations you use when tying in code are similar to the default key combinations Windows XP uses for switching keyboard layouts in the fly.

These instructions are for disabling keyboard layout switching in Windows XP. It's similar in other versions of Windows:-

• Go into control panel and select Regional And Language Options.
• Then on the Languages tab hit the Details button.
• On the dialog that pops up, on the Settings tab, hit the Keyboard button at the bottom of it.
• On the "Advanced Key Settings" box that pops up, select the other languages one by one and uncheck the key sequence options.
• OK it all out and you're free from frustration :)

U62- Perhaps people don't mark your solution as an answer if it's not an answer for them?

It's not a CTRL+SHIFT or any other key binding problem for me.

I do not even have US-International keyboard installed, yet Visual Studio constantly reverts back to it (I can see it in the Language bar, but when I go into Control Panel, it is not in the list of installed keyboards).

It's definitely something wrong with Visual Studio, because if I then move to Notepad, Notepad knows that the keyboard is UK. Move back to VS2010 again and it is back on US International.

EDIT: the answer is to go into Visual Studio settings, and select the International Settings pane. Make sure the Language is set to "Same as Microsoft Windows". "English" seems to be the US International keyboard English.

I posted this on another question, but wanted to post the picture here in case you're not using XP, and want to see how to accomplish this in Windows 7: