A client of ours a while back had picked up an ex-demo laptop and had got the shop they bought it from to install it as English. The keyboard remained as an Italian physical layout (which is a QWERTY layout but has extra accented characters).

Recently I was at their site and tried to use the laptop and noticed the @ (at) symbol wasn’t working. On the wall they had put up a note for people to use an ALT+064 sequence. OK but what !?

The fix was easy though not obvious at first glance (AltGr + q will actually print a @) and it is that there are two Italian keyboard layouts in Windows 7 – Italian and Italian (142).  This was set to “Italian (142)” where the AltGr+q is the @ key whereas it should have been set to just “Italian” where the AltGr+ò key is where the @ symbol is printed.

Added the layout (Language still English (British)) set the default language and layout to be just the “Italian”, and deleted the “Italian (142)” layout. Rebooted it to make sure that any applications hadn’t cached  the layout (Firefox seems to do this).

Keyboard now works as expected.