Windows 7 Microsoft Japanese IME input mapped differently from Vista?

urutapu said:

Alright, so I'm typing in Japanese for schoolwork, but apparently everything but the letters and numbers is mapped differently when I'm using Microsoft IME.

Click to expand...

I had a similar problem come up just yesterday, maybe my fix will work for you?
Tell it to Show the language bar, so that you have it going across the top of your window. Change to JPN to display the big list of options (Japanese, IME, Input Mode, etc.) on the far right will be CAPS and KANA buttons stacked one over the other. try adjusting those to see if they will change your keys back to normal. For me, "normal" is both buttons being white. When you activate them they change to blue.

I think we were having the same problem, here's a better description of mine for clarity/to help other people find it in the future.

I'd been using JPN input with win7x64 for several months with no trouble on my us keyboard (qwerty/asdfgh). I've been using it this way for several years over other OS's and always use the shift+alt and alt+capslock to change between ENG and JPN and also Romaji and Kana modes. At some point yesterday I hit a key shortcut like that caused it to switch into Japanese keyboard mode. So in english mode I had asdf, in Japanese alphanumeric I still had asdf, but in Japanese hiragana/katakana modes I had
a = ち　
s = と
d = し
f = は
which as you can imagine was pretty frustrating considering my US keyboard doesn't have the kana written on it to use in this way. After some trial and error I finally fixed it, my KANA (kana-nyuuryoku) button was activated.