A strange keyboard error which had such a simple fix but......

There are times when simple things are really simple. My Laptop X61 went bad and hence had to be sent for repair to IBM. They wanted a Demand Draft of INR 1665/- just to examine what went wrong. And it took them more than a week to tell me that its motherboard needs a replacement. I was so disappointed to hear this from IBM, not because it was going to drill a hole in my pocket but because it took IBM more than 7 days to tell me what I was aware of on day one. And in fact that was THE SOLUTION but IBM was supposed to delve deeper and tell me more precise solution viz. the chip below the second fan has gone wrong which was the actual diagnosis which they did after I wrote a really nasty email. Anyway, that's IBM.

In absence of my lifeline I got struck, lost many hours and then decided to revive my old Toshiba 17 inches monster P25-S5092. Somehow I have always been in favor of Linux, maybe because it gives me the freedom of modifying the kernel to give the OS a form of my liking and hence this monster was loaded with Linux. I had no way but to order (because I did not want to corrupt the beautifully modified Linux, Ubuntu to be precise) a new high capacity HDD and then get hold of a Windows XP. Everything went fine but on start the keyboard gave me a real tough time, other than alphabets all other keys were not in sync with my keyboard, e.g. @ and " had got interchanged. Tried hard, consulted some experts but no one could be of any help. Someone cursed Microsoft and advised me to switch over to Linux but he was not aware that Legal Software which are lifeline of my profession are not Linux-compatible and to make them run on Linux is too difficult a task like I have to wrap dlls to make them run in Linux which is also always successful anyway. As I usually say one has to die to go to heaven, I had to die and look for a solution myself, for these many hours I would have charged a client a huge sum.:-) 

Finally realized that it have something to do with keyboard type and this realization took me to Regional an Language Options available in Control Panel of Windows XP. There was my solution, I had to change the keyboard type from UK to USA and everything became normal. This brought an interesting question to may mind, why can't be have all English Keyboards of the world alike. But probably that won't be possible. Any guess, why??