I've been using an external USB keyboard for weeks now with my N810, due to cramping of the thumbs from typing on the little flip out keyboard and it's been doing fine!

I installed USBControl, got a F-F adaptor, set it all up and hey presto, I can type to my hearts content with relatively little finger pain.

But now something has gone wrong... I had to refash the device in an attempt to fix a battery problem (that's a whole other thread ) and only just got round to reinstalling it again.

It's always been a pain because the keyboard itself is UK layout, and for some reason the actual letters it types are US layout, but I memorised which buttons I needed to push to get the right symbols pretty much the day I got it and that doesn't bother me any more.

BUT! Last night, I settled in for a night of typing and strange things started to happen. Every time I typed a " I got an umlaut! and the Umlauts carried on all over the text! I had Ä Ö and even ÿ !!

And then on top of that my apostrophe key has turned into an accent key!! So every time I pushed ' I got accents over all the letters!!

So now I have 3000 words of Umlauts and Accents instead of inverted comers and apostrophes, with letters that are accented all wrong and I've got to go through and change the lot..... It's going to take hours!

Umlauts and Accents aren't even on the keyboard in the first place!! And where have the inverted comers and apostrophes gone?!

ANYWAY! The long and the short of it is, WHAT ON EARTH HAPPENED?! It's never done this before and I haven't changed any settings or anything! I don't want it send another night typing and end up with this garbled nonsense again... Not that what I write actually makes any sense anyway... But that's not the point!!

Any help in solving my latest dilemma will be greatly appreciated!!

Have you tried fiddling with the keyboard and regional settings in the Control Panel?

I'm pretty sure some of the settings there are to do with keyboard language.

It's all set up for English USA (changing it to UK did nothing when i tried last time, before the flash).

This is what it's always on, but it's never done Umlauts before! Maybe it wants to be German...

Not knowing which keyboard you are using, I can only venture that perhaps one fo the keys is stuck down. I have had stuff like that happen with a PC keyboard when one of the function keys or the alt key are stuck in the down position.

This is the keyboard: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...m=260320214178

As far as I can tell, there are no keys stuck down. Any idea which key could be causing the Umlauts? I've not found one that actually does that on any keyboard I've used.

why don't you try it on your PC to see if you have the same problem or not?

That was the first thing I tried

It works on the PC, and with UK layout too! It's just when using it with the N810 that I get the Umlauts and accents.

With those role up keyboards I'm not sure you can tell if a key is stuck as I think the membrain is a cover and not attached to the keys. I tried a roole up as well but found I had to be very deliberate when hitting keys or no character was recorded. Have you perchance tried your PC keyboard on the N810?

You can try messing around with 'hildon-im-xkbtool' in a Terminal.

Sounds very much like dead keys to me, but the only thing i can find about them and maemo, is that they aren't working.
(http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=2394)