At work over the past few months I have occasionally encountered a rather strange problem on newly-installed PCs. The problem is quite simple:

• If you type a single quote (‘) or double quote (“), nothing happens.
• If you type another, two suddenly appear.

Furthermore, if you hit a quote key at one position then move the cursor and hit it again, both quotes will appear at the second location.

This feature is common to both Windows Vista and XP, and seems to appear when you have extra English-language keyboards added like UK and NZ. I’m not really sure what it’s purpose is, but I found it very annoying.

Here’s how I fixed it:

1. Open the Regional and Language Options control panel.
2. Click on the Keyboards and Languages tab. Click on the Change Keyboards button.
3. Remove all the installed keyboards until none are left except English US. It should look something like this:
   
4. Restart your computer.