AltGr randomly stops working on windows 10

Question

I am using a number of different keyboard layouts, depending on which language/keyboard I am woring with. Some of these rely on the AltGr key for producing certain symbols like @ (e.g. the Swedish layout).

Since I updated to Windows 10, the AltGr key intermittently ceases to work (while Ctrl + Alt + still works). Similar issues have been reported with Win 8 and Win 8.1, but the solutions to these do not apply to my case (and perhaps not to other Win 10 cases. So I will try to be very precise in describing the issue here.

To start with, when I say "the AltGr key stops working", what I mean is that it fails to act as Ctrl + Alt (which is what it is supposed to do). However, it does do something: for example, when I press AltGr + 2 and then another ordinary key, say "A" what I get is "2a". Note that the 2 does not appear until I press the A. In other words, when pressed with AltGr, the "2"-key is somehow treated like a dead key.

Changing between different keyboard layouts does not help. AltGr will not work neither in those other keyboard layouts nor in the original one when I switch back to it. The only way to get AltGr working again seems to be to reboot the system (though I have also seen instances where a reboot from a system with a working AltGr key led to a system with a non-working AltGr key).

It also does not make a difference whether I use the Windows 10 screen keyboard or the hardware keyboard. In the case of the On-screen keyboard, pressing the AltGr key correctly displays the characters on those keys that have one assigned to them (in combination with AltGr), but despite this, tapping one of those keys does not produce the displayed character.

Answer 1

It turns out that, in my case, the reason for this was wincompose, a program that I had uninstalled but for unknown reasons that uninstall partially failed so that the core of the program was still running in the background and interpreting some of my AltGr keyboard inputs as shortcuts (without any function).

This question has been extremely popular over the past few months, which means that many people are facing similar issues. Most likely, this will not be the solution for them, but I hope that more answers will eventually come up so that everyone finds a solution.

Answer 2

The issue happens when you open a RDP connection. Just bring the RDP window in foreground and press Alt+Enter.

The issue will disappear on all other windows too

Source: How to Fix Alt Gr Key Not Working.

Answer 3

In my case left Shift+Caps Lock+AltGr helped. I have no idea what it does, but it works.

Answer 4

It might seem silly but in my case I had accidentally switched keyboard locale from "German" to "US" and nothing was working as expected.

Answer 5

Some utility programs can also "steal" the keyboard stroks.

In my case it appeared that the VirtualDesktopManager resulted in non-functional AltGr, so I could not write [ and ].

Answer 6

On my black widow keyboard I solved this by turning off the macro button for AltGr+Fn.

Answer 7

In my case i solved it by noticing the problem fast after the problem was installed wich in this case was fortnite stealing the keybind for ALT (left&right)