Problem
I cannot press Shift+` on my PC to create the tilde character. This problem happens with both my physical keyboard and the on-screen keyboard. If I plug my physical keyboard into another computer, it works fine.
Troubleshooting
Language Switcher Keys
A common solution I see posted is that people have completely disabled their backtick key to allow them to switch languages. That is not my problem:
Shortcut (.lnk) keyboard shortcut
Someone else recommended using a tool to find shortcuts (.lnk files) with keyboard shortcuts set up on them. This tool has not found anything.
Spy++
I have tried using Spy++ to track down which window is intercepting the key as a hotkey. I found solutions like this one recommending this approach.
And this does indeed show that the key combo is being intercepted as a hotkey:
but if I follow the links through this tool to find the specific Window + Process, it just points to "Explorer". I don't know where to go from here:
UPDATE:
Safe Mode
I had tried this before when I last tried troubleshooting this issue but I tried it again: Safe Mode does not fix the issue. If I boot into safe mode, I still cannot type the tilde.
OpenArk
I found another resource that recommended a program called OpenArk. I was a bit wary of this but it seems to play nice. I ran the tool to detect hotkeys and it did indeed find the hotkey registered. And to be clear, it is C:\Windows\explorer.exe and not some fake one, as far as I can tell:
This tool lets me delete the hotkey from the registry - and this actually worked!!!~~~~~~~~ I'm typing these right now from the problem PC!
The problem though is that if I restart my computer, the hotkey comes back. So it's a temporary fix but not one I'm satisfied with. But I think it confirms that it's definitely some hotkey at play.
Next I'd like to figure out what is registering the hotkey to begin with. Is there perhaps a mechanism to log which processes are registering hotkeys?