need to get rid of french characters on login screen

the user of a macbook got to their new system before i could and chose
the canadian (french) language setting as default (when they just
wanted plain canadian) without looking which meant some of the keys
were transposed with the french characters (pressing the "\" key below
the "delete" button resulted in a small letter a with an accent above
it)

i have corrected the keyboard and language problems when the user is
logged in, you now get the slash when the "\" key is pressed, but on
the login screen at startup it is still inserting the small letter a
with and accent instead of the slash

i have checked all the setting i could think of in the system
preferences but it still won't put the correct characters in at the
login screen

we need to use the slash, as we are unfortunately tied to an active
directory network which requires the user to login as "domainname
\username"

a couple of hours of searching has proved to be useless and i would
rather not have to resort to re-installing the entire os to resolve
this if possible, however that would mean i could keep the macbook
away from the user for quite some time and hope to teach them a
lesson

any ideas on how i can solve this problem?

thanks

 

Activate the root user and change its settings. Worked for me.

 

i figured it out, i deleted the setup file in /preferences/var/db and
rebooted, it then ran the setup assistant from scratch and i was able
to redo the default language settings

 

I created a keyboard layout that allowed me to easily do pinyin.
I intentionally called it Roman so that some of the stupider apps
wouldn't "unselect it." But that allowed the system to keep it
selected when logging out, making logging in difficult.

So I selected the setting you just mentioned.
It did not work--login window is unchanged, no
additional menu or other control. OS 10.3.9

--
Wes Groleau

You're all individuals!
Yes, we're all individuals!
You're all different!
Yes, we are all different!
I'm not!

("Life of Brian")

 

It's definitely a new feature in 10.4.x It wasn't present in 10.3.

Andre

 

Hmmm. I don't see it on the Login options nor on the
International prefPane. Yet I'm certain I did something
to try to set it. Maybe I just edited it into a plist.

--
Wes Groleau

Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which
the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.
-- unknown

 

Accounts
Login Options
Show Input menu in login window

Simon.

 

Like I said, I don't see it on the Login options ....

 

Well, I also said I'm on 10.3.9

The odd thing is that I _know_ I made an attempt to set it,
but I don't remember how. Doesn't matter, since it didn't work.

 

Ouch. Yeah, I've dealt with this before. I'm assuming you're using
10.3...

It's been a long time, but if I recall correctly the login screen uses
the root user's keyboard layout.

1. Enable the root user with NetInfo Manger.
2. Log out, and log back in using the root user.
3. Change the keyboard layout of the root user.
4. Log out.

At this point, you should be getting the new keyboard layout on the
login screen. Log back in to your usual account and disable the root
user.

As others have noted, this has been fixed in a more sane way in 10.4.