Steam games cause language bar bug

[Tesseract]

Hi, just wanted to say that there is a bug with CSS, TF2 and other stand-alone games I have noticed. I do not have US English keyboard layout, and every time I run the game, I see that language added to my layouts and language bar. It is so annoying and seems nobody will be doing anything regarding that.


See my post below:
a link to workaround to resolve this issue http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/1/864976115478357063/#c616187203915736491

[EuroSong]

Yes - this happens to me too. It is very annoying. And it appears to be a bug: the language is not "added" as such: the language bar appears by itself next to the systray, and gives "ENG (US)" as an option - but it's not in the list of installed languages. The only way to remove it is to manually ADD that language to Windows, and then remove it again. Then it disappears.... until the next time I play Portal 2, or some such. This is definitely a Steam bug. I am not American, so please do not add unwanted languages to my system. Please acknowledge this bug and confirm that you are going to do something about it in a future release. Thanks.

[Tesseract]

hey EuroSong amazing someone replied to me. It is not only Steam bug, that happens to few more apps or games that are not Steam. last year I sent the ticket to support and they replied to me it is Microsoft bug. So this lasts for years already, mate, and we, users, are left alone to this. No one actually cares, nor microsoft nor gabens. they did not fix that in windows 8.
i believe there is a way to fix this on steam side at least, but maybe there is something more to this.

[Dagnabbit]

Originally posted by thanks for teamsmoke:

hey EuroSong amazing someone replied to me. It is not only Steam bug, that happens to few more apps or games that are not Steam. last year I sent the ticket to support and they replied to me it is Microsoft bug. So this lasts for years already, mate, and we, users, are left alone to this. No one actually cares, nor microsoft nor gabens. they did not fix that in windows 8.
i believe there is a way to fix this on steam side at least, but maybe there is something more to this.

Not Valve's issue. The very fact that you said it happens in Apps and Games that aren't Steam related makes this abundantly clear. It also means your thread title is incredibly misleading, especially since Steam Support already told you to contact MS about it as only they can fix it.

[Tesseract]

why can't steam contact, or someone else, for these all years? maybe they did but no one cares. why other apps does not have this issue, i am not a real programmer but apparently MS would say that there is no issue on their side and would advice to review the source code of the program which create this issue.

[EuroSong]

Hi Homura. Thanks for telling me that Steam already told you to refer to Microsoft. However from my own experience, I have only ever noticed Source games doing this. I have not seen it happen with other programs in Windows. If I don't play Steam/Source games, I can go for weeks on end without this problem appearing. Then one play of Portal 2, and bingo - it's there! That suggests that it's a Source issue. By the way, not all Steam games do this: just the Source engine ones. So there is a problem either in the Source engine, or a latent problem in Windows which is triggered by something in the Source engine. Either way, Steam/Valve need to look into this and positively identify it. They can't just pass the buck to Microsoft without identifying exactly what's going wrong in the Source engine's interface with Windows.

[inferno]

Any workaround for this? I was hoping for fix in windows 8.1, but no, the bug is still there :)

[Lounger, The Creator]

I've been having this problem for ages...

When I start Team Fortress 2, Chinese is added and because there are now two languages, the language bar appears.
While this doesn't seem like a big deal, the big problem comes from the hot-key to switch languages, which is Ctrl+Space.
So, every time there's more than one language (= lang bar visible) this hot-key is enabled system-wide.
Now this is a complete hell when you want to rocket-jump, it just doesn't work.
Disabling the hot-key through the correct menus or even the registry does not work, so that's a Windows bug (a very long standing one.)
When opening the language settings, Chinese isn't even on the list and I have to add it, press OK, then go back and Remove it.

Why is all of this happening? I think Windows has some (old) language settings bound to an executable name: hl2.exe
Which is why everyone thinks it's related to Source, they all use hl2.exe.

[Tesseract]

To: Lounger, The Creator 14 Jun @ 6:27pm

It is not necessarily MS Windows bug. Steam is NA company and their games language is American English I guess. That is why it requires US keyboard layout. Just a guess too.

According to your theory, I can rename solitaire.exe to hl2.exe, launch it and will see new keyboard layout added to my language bar, if I understood you correctly. But this does not work like that.

[Lounger, The Creator]

My theory has nothing to do with what origin Steam has or what language their games Valve games use by default.
My Windows is EN-US and so are all my language settings (and I don't live in the US btw.)
Also it's not specific to hl2.exe, that's just the case on my system and likely many others.
The thing is, some language setting are saved by something (windows?), on some place (registry?) which is Chinese in my case. A language that was added for testing many years ago.

[artemonster]

WHY NO ONE FIXES THIS CRAP?

[Tesseract]

it's been like this for years. i bet valve would kick this up to microsoft and microsoft back to valve. so no one wants to take a responsibility.
i had to reset my steam support website password recently only to find out i was typing it wrong cuz of this us keyboard issue.

[EuroSong]

Anyone from Valve reading this? Can we at least acknowledge that there is an issue which needs to be addressed by Valve or Microsoft - or both?

[Tesseract]

Just keep adding and removing US language.

[Tesseract]

Hi All participants of this topic and everyone else.
I was pointed out to this workaround.
This is not a solution, but, probably, we will not get anything else in regards to this problem.
Here it is:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/1/864976115478357063/#c616187203915736491
this removes Gabens keyboard layout from your PC and you will never mistype your passwords anymore if you know what I mean.

[Bisqwit]

I have experienced this bug consistently in Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10. Every time I launch Portal 2, USA-English becomes the default input language, but without appearing in the list of installed languages (I only have Japanese and Finnish). To get rid of it, I have to add the language and remove it again. And it still unsolicitedly appear again every time I run Portal 2, no matter how many times I add+remove it.
EDIT: Musketeers-Tesseract's workaround (the post above) does seem to help, at least in Windows 10.