Sorting it all Out

Thanks. At least I know that I'm not crazy or irretrievably stupid.

Well, not stupid anyway. ;)

I swear I had problems even changing the keystroke to something more obscure (and I ended up removing the chinese language option because of it). But now I added it back in, and keyboard hotkey switching doesn't seem to work at all (I have to use the tray applet). *Sigh* Well, that's better than always using ctrl-space anyway.

Some time ago, Michael Kaplan wrote about the Ctrl Space hotkey and its broken configuration in Windows Vista. What is particularly evil about the Ctrl Space combination is that takes control even when the language is not selected. So you can be

This is also a problem in XP. And unfortunately it's still not fixed in Vista SP1 :-(

Also, assigning a different hot key doesn't really work - sooner or later it is back at Ctrl-Space.

Any ideas? Assigning / unassigning a new hot key seems to be completely ignored (Vista SP1). If I want to program I need to remove the Chinese IME. And then if I want to type Chinese I need to reinstall the IME.

Unfortunately in Windows Vista uninstalling the IME is still not sufficient. It keeps reappearing and reassigning the Ctrl+Space sequence. This is excessively frustrating because I cannot get rid of it at all.

Does anyone know the correct registry settings to remove the damn thing?

yup, this is really annoying... as i am a graphic designer, working on adobe photoshop and illustrator are pain in the arse.... when i try to zoom in, it changes itself to chinese input. anyone knows how to deal with this? thank you.

I'm a programmer; I use Visual Studio and Emacs, so ctrl-space is vital to what I do every day.  I've discovered that using an alternative desktop shell such as GeoShell alleviates this issue.

It's kind of a shame really, I was starting to get into the shell enhancements they made for Vista.  Maybe I'll switch back when and if I see that there's an official fix for this.

This "solution" also points out that this must be a bug in explorer.exe, or in its interaction with the language system (such as where explorer.exe keeps its keyboard hooks).

So the question that came in from Grant via the Contact link was kind of interesting: What are the "Hot

Alt+Right Arrow can be used in Visual Studio as an alternative to Ctrl+Space

Alt+Right Arrow can be used for intellisense, but I use Emacs and the Emacs keyboard scheme in Visual Studio, for which there can be no alternative to ctrl+space.

The main issue is that the keyboard should be left open for applications by the operating system; looking at my keyboard, I can only see one key that I would expect windows to "steal".

I somehow work around this way:  install one more language

I install Japanese and Chinese on an English win XP.  Woops, XP does not response the Ctrl-Space any more, lalala...

I think properly XP just sits there and does not know which ime toggle to.

Hei's advice didn't work for me unfortunately. Still cycles IME with more than one IME. This problem also makes the keyboard shortcut in Excel (CTRL+Space) not work.

Thanks But after this Disable also In Excel Contr + Space Shortcut key not working Why......

This same problem occurred to me while using Flash CS4 on Vista. I was trying to change the Keyboard Shortcut for the magnifier tool to the more familiar Ctrl-Space, when the Language Bar switched to Chinese Traditional Taiwan.

So I unchecked Enable Key Sequence and changed the shortcut to something obscure, like Shift-LeftAlt-F12. It seemed to work for a while, but whenever I went back to Flash the same thing happened. So I felt I had no choice but to remove the Chinese language packs, but IT STILL SWITCHED TO CHINESE.

After trying to figure out what happened, I realized that Ctrl-Space only switched to Chinese on applications that were already open, but (finally) didn't work when I opened new applications or restarted the existing ones. Very strange behavior, indeed.

Amazingly, this problem STILL EXISTS in Windows 7!!! I've really got to wonder if MS is paying attention at all. Do they have no engineers in China??? I really can't believe it.

I am experiencing the same problem. Changing the Hot Key in language setting or removing Chinese Input does not help. Anyone please let me know, if you find a solution.

Is there a bug opened with Microsoft?  This bug exists in XP, Vista and Windows 7.  I wounder when will this be fixed?

It seems a lot of people (myself included) having issue with this but no fix in sight?

If you change the letter that it works with, you can change it from Control-Space.

It's not disabled, but you can set it to a combination you would never use except for intentionally (Control + Shift + Fsomething?)

I came across this thread because I was having the exact same problem, but where it was driving me nuts was Excel (Ctrl+Space selects a column) and the VBA Editor.

I also, went into the keyboard controls and removed Chinese from my language list to no avail.  I'm grateful that many of you tried very complex solutions, because that's what I would have done next.  But your frustrations caused me to try "dum dum school" stuff instead.  I ended up going back into the Regional Language section and pretended to add a keyboard.  I then expanded every Chinese option on the menu and expanding every "Keyboard" and every "other".  In a couple of instances the "Drawing pad [32-bit only]" option was checked (even though I'm running Vista-64.  I unchecked the drawing pad boxes wherever I found them to be checked, clicked OK and so far, so good.  

Hopefully this might help some poor soul in the future.