Thunderbird has strange characters when composing mail

[Terencek]

Anyone know how to fix a strange problem now I have reinstalled W7 and Thunderbird: composing a new email, some of the characters become accented (e.g. when you type a quote mark followed by an o you get an accented o instead of what you wanted, and a closing quote doesn't have a space when you type a space, etc.)?

I remember I had this problem earlier when I reinstalled, but I can't remember how I fixed it! It doesn't appear to lie with choosing the Western character set in Thunderbird's Options/Display. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[webslave]

as far as I can remember its not thunderbird at fault its the default keyboard...

 

[Dean]

Check in Language/Region settings that your default language and keyboard are English (South Africa) or English (USA)... other layouts and languages will change the keyboard input.

 

[Terencek]

Thx for the help, but I'm still struggling -- and you're right, it's nothing to do with Thunderbird, it's a Windows setting which is affecting all my text inputting.

What I've now got is UK English as my default Language, and US International as my default Keyboard.

But what this leaves me with is still definitely not right, namely:

When you press a closing quote or double quote, and then a space, you don't get the space. In other words you end up with The "quick"brown fox or The 'quick'brown fox... Pressing the spacebar seems to activate the quote mark on the screen and 'forgets'to add the space.

Also: press a single quote and then a vowel and you get an accented character e.g. ó instead of ' and then o. Driving me nuts -- and a disaster given that what I do for a living is writing and editing!!! What to do?

 

[Dean]

Okay so again...

Change language to English South Africa
and keyboard to US (or SA)... without the Intl part.

and let us know how that goes...

 

[Terencek]

Tks guys for all the input, which put me on the right path and finally enabled me to solve the problem -- with one interesting tweak which is definitely not obvious....

Ultimately what I ended up with was UK English as my Language, and US (NOT US International!) as my keyboard. But then one more tweak was needed to resolve the problem: I had to put the Keyboard icon on the Taskbar, then right-click it and uncheck the 'Auto Adjust' option. Voila: problem solved! No more freaky keyboard problems, unintended accented characters, odd quote mark behaviour etc. Who knew!