{"id":21523,"date":"2008-07-22T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/07\/22\/windows-could-not-properly-load-the-xyz-keyboard-layout\/"},"modified":"2008-07-22T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T10:00:00","slug":"windows-could-not-properly-load-the-xyz-keyboard-layout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080722-00\/?p=21523","title":{"rendered":"Windows could not properly load the XYZ keyboard layout"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my r&ocirc;le as <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/01\/01\/1393908.aspx\"> the family technical support department<\/a>, I get to poke around without really knowing what I&#8217;m doing and hope to stumble across a solution. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail.<\/p>\n<p> Today, I&#8217;m documenting one of my successes in the hope that it might come in handy for you, the technical support department for your family. (If not, then I guess today is not your day.) <\/p>\n<p> The boot drive on the laptop belonging to one of my relatives became corrupted, and her brother-in-law had the honor of extracting the drive, sticking it into a working computer, doing the <code>chkdsk<\/code> magic, reinstalling the software that got corrupted, and otherwise getting the machine back on its feet. (It&#8217;s a good thing I wasn&#8217;t the one to do it because all of the programs are in Chinese, and I can&#8217;t read Chinese beyond a few dozen characters.) Anyway, the machine returned to life, mostly. The bizarro proprietary hardware (that a certain manufacturer insists on using in order to make their machines <i>special<\/i>) still doesn&#8217;t have drivers, but it was happy for the most part. <\/p>\n<p> There was just one problem remaining, and it fell upon me to fix it: She couldn&#8217;t type Chinese characters any more. Normally, this is done by selecting an appropriate IME, but no matter what we picked, it was as if we were always using the US-English keyboard. <\/p>\n<p> One clue was that if you deleted the IME and then re-added it, you got the error message <code>Windows could not properly load the XYZ keyboard layout<\/code>. <\/p>\n<p> Here is how I fixed it. (This was a Windows&nbsp;XP machine.) Maybe it will help you, maybe not. <\/p>\n<p> First, go to the Regional and Language Options control panel and set everything back to English (US): <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On the Advanced tab, under &#8220;Select a language to match the language     version of the non-Unicode programs you want to use&#8221;,     select &#8220;English (United States)&#8221;. <\/li>\n<li>On the Languages tab,     under &#8220;Text services and input languages&#8221;, click the Details     button. Change your default input language to     &#8220;English (United States) &#8211; US&#8221;     and remove all the non-English keyboard layouts. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> Restart to make sure that nobody is using those old services. <\/p>\n<p> After the restart, go back to the Regional and Language Options control panel, go to the Languages tab, and uncheck &#8220;Install files for East Asian languages.&#8221; That is the whole point of this exercise. All the other steps were just removing enough obstacles so we could do that. <\/p>\n<p> Restart to make sure nobody is using any of the East Asian fonts. <\/p>\n<p> After the restart, add the East Asian fonts back, and when you&#8217;re asked whether you should use the files already on the machine, say &#8220;No.&#8221; That way, they will be re-copied from the CD. <\/p>\n<p> (This step was trickier for me, because one of the hardware devices that didn&#8217;t work was the DVD drive! I thought I was stuck, but then I realized that the wireless network antenna still was functional, so I went to another computer in the house, put the Windows&nbsp;XP CD in the drive, and shared out the CD-ROM drive. Then I went back to the first computer and told it to install the files from the second computer.) <\/p>\n<p> Once everything gets reinstalled (including the corrupted keyboard layout files), you can go back and add the Chinese IME back, and reset all those other settings back to Chinese. <\/p>\n<p> Neither I nor the owner of the laptop is very good at the other&#8217;s native language (though she is far better at English than I am at Chinese), so fixing her computer is the best way I have of showing her my appreciation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my r&ocirc;le as the family technical support department, I get to poke around without really knowing what I&#8217;m doing and hope to stumble across a solution. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail. Today, I&#8217;m documenting one of my successes in the hope that it might come in handy for you, the technical support department [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-21523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>In my r&ocirc;le as the family technical support department, I get to poke around without really knowing what I&#8217;m doing and hope to stumble across a solution. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail. Today, I&#8217;m documenting one of my successes in the hope that it might come in handy for you, the technical support department [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}