Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) (v1.4) is not officially compatible with Windows 8. Some report that it works anyway but I cannot confirm that and there are other reports on the net that have the same problem. Because there seem to be several similar scenarios, let me be specific about the one I'm talking about here:
I'm on a Windows 8.1 machine (64 bit) and I have a custom keyboard layout created with MSKLC on my Windows 7 machine. When running the setup.exe
on the Win8 machine, the keyboard layout seemed to install smoothly, just like on Win7.
The next step is to add the custom layout to whichever input language you want to use it with. That also works fine (although there is a foreboding because the preview doesn't work, it's greyed out). But the real problem comes after this: you wont find your new layout in the language bar and you wont be able to select it with the default keyboard shortcut Alt+⇧ Shift.
So the question is: is there a way to use the custom layout anyway?