Foreign characters occasionally drop in

[ChrisGreaves]

Please see also "Overtype and Insertion Mode"
No, nothing to do with my spare bedroom near YYZ.

I will be happily typing away, and then notice that a forward-slash has been entered as an e-acute, or else double-quotes appear as upper-case E-circumflex (or maybe it was grave ...)

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There is no doubt in my mind that I have inadvertently two-finger-typed some weird escape sequence that tells Win7/Word2003 to switch to a different character set, but oh! sometimes I don't discover it until after 30 minutes of head-down-fixated-on-the-keyboard work, and then spell-check trips over everything.
My current solution is to unload Word, reload, re-open the document and make corrections and mutter evil things under my breath.
I'd appreciate knowing what I'm doing (which sounds lame, but you know what I mean)
Thanks.