success! with a keyboard that is....
 

ok, i had a trouble with my keyboard, backslash and questions marks would make strange É things (i had to hit alt so many times to get that) or they would make the small version, in general all of the punctuation was messed, jumbled etc.

i think the problem had to do with my region settings, i was setup for canada but had a US keyboard layout, don't ask my why, as i'm a noob and don't really know, but going into control center, the peripheals, and then into keyboard, in the KDE 3.1 desktop (running under slackware dist....curses for my wanting purity and not using redhat or mandrake :D the payoff should be good though) and then changing the keyboard layout to United Kingdom did the trick

hope this helps anyone with the same trouble! :)

P.S. - i had the same thing happening in Gnome, and while i havn't tested it, i'm sure the solution is likely somewhat similar.

try checking the xfree86 config file for the keyboard layout, ifaik the regional settings of the keyboard are configured there.