alternate keyboard locked on in WLM

[StickBoy]

I have been using Windows Live Mail 2011 (Build 15.4.3508.1109) for about a week now. Suddenly, last night, it began typing in the "alternate" keyboard language. (I am not sure about the wording here. I have an Acer Aspire laptop with a bilingual keyboard. On setting up the computer it made it very clear I had to choose English or French and I could not change it later. Of course I chose English. Normally the green characters don't show up, only the white ones. But now only the green characters are showing up.)

But it only happens when composing or replying in Windows Live Mail. I have tried Notepad, WordPad, Firefox and even Internet Explorer, and they all display the proper characters, as they are on my keyboard. Only in WLM does it use the 'alternate' characters.

I checked in Control Panel for keyboards and languages and regions and all that stuff, but it is all set as expected, to English.
In WLM, I have looked at the encoding, which is set to Western European (ISO), which I believe is correct. Changing it to Western European (Windows) or UTF-8 did not make any difference.

As far as I know, I changed nothing. (The change actually occurred last night in the middle of composing an email. One sentence the question mark was a ? and the next sentence the question mark came out as É.) I am used to a full size keyboard, so I have had some issues with "fat fingers", so it's possible I hit a forbidden button combination. I just need to know what it is so I can change it back!

Please note the green alternate keys are different from the blue Function keys.

Thanks!

[JoeP517]

Try Left ALT + Shift.

Joe

[StickBoy]

Thanks Joe, I will keep that in mind.
Between my post and your response, I tried something I should have tried before: I restarted WLM. It works fine now.

I wish I would have thought of that before, but hopefully this almost pointless thread will help the next baffled user.

Thanks again!

[JoeP517]

Glad you got it worked out. Thanks for posting back.

Joe

[StickBoy]

UPDATE:
The problem kept occurring at random intervals, and not just in WLM, but in all programs, but not all at the same time. After much discussion with Acer tech support, I figured out the solution.
I didn't have the keyboard thingy displayed on my taskbar, for one thing (which is why Joe's solution above did not work).
I went into the Control Panel, Region and Language, Keyboards and Languages and clicked on Change Keyboards. Although "US" was set as default (and always has been, even when the alternate characters were showing up), there were other keyboards listed. I simply deleted those other keyboards, leaving "US" as the only keyboard. This was a month ago and I have not had the problem since.
Sheesh.

[VR Trooper]

I've had this same problem on my current Win7 Acer Aspire as well as on my HP laptop in Vista, just before Win7 came out. Will try the change and see how it goes.
Thanks StickBoy and JoeP517