Different countries have different keyboard layouts. But, ultimately, the software decides which character to render.
So, after plugging a French/US/whatever keyboard into your machine, you need to switch your locale settings too.
Windows will allow you to switch between locale settings with a couple of key presses if you do need to work with different key maps. (as I did once - I just painted all the extra characters on my keyboard too. It was a right mess.)
-Russ