Help? Problem with Dell Inspiron 8100 Keymap in WinXP

[schizoid]

I have a lovely Dell Inspiron 8100 with WinXP Pro on it. I was testing out an old MS USB Internet Keyboard Pro that I had spilled water on awhile ago (I wanted to see if it worked, as the water had f'ed up the keymap on it, and I wanted to know if it had magically "fixed" itself, or if I could throw it away). So, I plug in the keyboard, and it's still messed up, so I throw it away...I don't notice until later, that the keymap on the actual Dell keyboard is now screwed as well! For example, "i" now maps to "5".

A couple of things: This is NOT a physical problem, as I don't think my keyboard just broke itself, and I have a Redhat partition on the laptop, and the keymap is fine there.

I even pluged in a different, working MS Keyboard (the same exact model) thinking that might reset whatever had been done, but no luck. I've tried "removing" the keyboard (the built in one) in control panel, but that doesn't seem to do much of anything. I don't really want to have to reinstall XP, so I figured I'd ask you wonderful peoples.

Any thoughts?

(Totally unrelated: Apparently, there's a new Crystal Fusion driver out there, and Automatic update keeps trying to install it, clobbering my lovely Hercules Game Theater XP drivers....I've turned off automatic update, but is there any way of "excluding" certain updates?)

Thanks for your help!

 

[TronX]

Did you try changing the default languages of your computer?
Because I know other countries may use our alphabet but the
layout of the keyboard is not the same.

 

[schizoid]

Hmmm...well, I still want it to be english, but maybe switching it, and switching it back would work. Right now, I'm just trying to copy all of the "key*.*" files from another XP install to the laptop, and we'll see if that works....




Nope. =[

 

[TronX]

Does it matter of it's usb or ps2 keyboards?

 

[schizoid]

God bless WinXP restore points. =]