How to update a keyboard layout DLL on Windows?
- by user87690
Information about keyboard layout is stored in keyboard layout DLLs on Windows. One can make a custom layout using a tool like Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx). It creates the dynamical library and also an installer which places the DLL at a right place and also puts necessary information to registry so the layout can be used.
Now my question. How can one update his custom layout? One could uninstall the layout and install the new version which effectively replaces the DLL file. However this alone doesn't work because it seems that the old copy of the DLL stays loaded somewhere and is used when one sets the layout instead of loading new version. So is there a way how to tell the system that its “keyboard layout cache” is invalid? Of course I could reboot the whole system but I'd like to avoid it as it's annoying and seems to be poor design to reboot whole system just to reload a DLL.