You've probably toggled a foreign keyboard on by accident. Is the Language
bar showing? It displays two letters indicating the current keyboard
language. It might have FR or ES showing right now, and displays in the
Windows task bar. Click the two-letter tool and choose EN for English.

Better still, after resetting the keyboard language to English, right-click
the EN and choose Settings - Key Settings, and disable the hot keys from
changing languages. This can keep you from accidentally toggling the
keyboard setting.

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
http://www.herbtyson.com
Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along.
"Michael" wrote in message
...
Why can't I type quotation marks without hitting space bar? This
phenomenon
seems to have happened suddenly. Previously I hit the quotation mark key
and
it appeared instantly, now when I hit it it doesn't appear until I hit the
space bar.