Apple Keyboard and Windows 7 @ and " characters swapped over

Since putting bootcamp on Apple Macs we've always had a problem where the keys on the Keyboard in windows were never 'quite' right. Almost, but not. The most annoying one was the old @ key being swapped with " key.

Even after installing bootcamp drivers this problem persisted. It did turn quite interesting though:
I went into keyboard language setup and added "United Kingdom (Apple)", and deleted the bog standard "United Kingdom". After this, in some dialogue boxes the keyboard was behaving correctly (" and @ not swapped) and in everything else the @ and " keys were swapped around!

After trauling through google search results, I searched for Keyboard Regedit as I was sure something could be done here. After finding this article about changing keyboard regions I did the following steps:

1. Opened Regedit
2. went to  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Preload
3. Took note of what was here
1. there were two entries:
1. 1.   a0000809
2. 1.  00000809
4. I next went to  HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Keyboard Layout\Preload
5. Took a note what was here
1. there was only one entry
1. 1.  00000809
6. I thus deduced that the Apple keyboard was a0000809 and the normal (incorrect) keyboard was 00000809
7. I deleted the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Preload\00000809 so there was only one entry here
8. I edited the HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Keyboard Layout\Preload entry so it read:
1. 1.  a0000809
9. I rebooted and it all worked!!!!!

So, the problem was that Windows was using the Normal UK language layout for the keyboard, and when I added the Apple UK language layout it only used it at times because there was two entries for my login. But when the computer initially loads up the Apple version wasn't there. Now time for a cuppa.

Google Chrome downloads are invisible to Finder on OS X

For some reason whenever I download a file using Google Chrome on OS X I cannot see the file in the downloads folder. The only thing I've done is changed the default download folder to another location. I have noticed that the file is actually there using the 'ls' in terminal. Also, I can open the file from within Google Chrome.

Very odd, but I've had a look into it and found the hidden chflag which hides files from the finder. It's used so that people don't see and interfere with files they're not ment to.

A quick fix (but which I don't like) is to make all hidden files viewable from Finder. To do this open terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

It's very ugly because all I want to do is see the downloads which are hidden, not every file. They're made invisible for a reason.

Looking more into it, it turns out that files can be flagged up as 'hidden'. This makes them invisible. So to make files hidden or not hidden in terminal you type:

chflags nohidden afilethatishiddenforexample.txt

or to make it hidden again:

chflags nohidden afilethatisnothiddenforexample.txt

Think I'll just have to log out and back in again to fix Google Chrome properly.