(Re-Occurring) Problem of characters on the keyboard

Had this problem as a mild annoyance in VBA.

Now it has moved to Word.


When typing in VBA code or a word document the character set for the keyboard changes.

In VBA the key 'a' became 'q' and lots of other substitutions were made.
In Word I was (happily?) typing in English, when it changed to french. On changing back to english the keys still typed in french (1=> & 2=' etc) I closed and reopened and it still happened, then I remembered Outlook holds an instance of Word open, so I went to the task manager and killed that, and now word is working again.

Is there a combination of key presses that causes this?
Is it a 'feature' of Windoze ?
Has anyone else had this problem? (or is it just me?)

I do have this problem on Win XP Pro with Word XP.
Only ever happens at college though thankfully.
I don't know how to solve it as its accross other apps as well :(