Lost ability to enter extended ASCII characters

ALT-0nnn on numberpad no longer works

[balam]

Some time this week I lost the ability to type extended ASCII characters - in this case, accented letters - using the usual ALT-0nnn numberpad technique. (Holding down the ALT key, and then typing 0225 on your numberpad yields a lowercase "a" with an acute accent.)

As you can guess, this makes typing in Spanish rather difficult & slow...

I'm using Windows 2000, been doing this for years, and haven't changed any (Control Panel) settings in a long while.

Currently, what I get when trying to get an accented "a" varies from program to program. In Wordpad, the technique mostly works (some letters require an extra, random keypress); in Internet Explorer, which I'm using to post this message, I get a club symbol (as in a deck of cards). When entered into this message, the club symbol becomes this two-character combo (which I suspect is a hint to the problem): ¢À

Other programs yield a question mark, nothing, or some unprintable character. If it means anything, or helps, my keyboard's input locale & layout (noted in the Control Panel) are "English (US)" and "US," respectively.

Um, help, por favor?

[kaled]

I can offer two wild guesses...
1) Bad keyboard - try swapping with someone else. (Specifically, a key might be stuck down.)
2) Spyware or faulty utility software. A badly formed global keyboard hook might behave unpredictably.

Also, it goes without saying that a restart should be tried if you haven't done so already.

Kaled.

[Shetty]

Hi

Even i have lost the ability after the last windows update on 3 of my machines. On the machines which are not updated no problems When i open a php file in notepad and save it and close it and open it all the enter charecters are gone.

Any solutions i am no longer able to edit php files.

Vipin Shetty.

[bill]

Have you tried the same files in any other text editors?

From my experience, if I save a file in Notepad that contains a non-ANSI character set then these will either be removed or show up as with placeholders. The end result can be gibberish.

[Shetty]

hi

Notepad
I noticed that any css or php file i open and save in notepad i lose all the new line chars and it is a single line once i reopen it.

WordPad
When i open i wordpad it is already in a single line

I use Filezilla to get my files ?
I have not updated Filezilla My windows is set to autoupdate with ask I remember this problem started after last update.