[GoodThings2Life]

The reason it breaks is because of Opera. Opera insists on changing it to "web only" and other adaptive modes depending on where cursor focus is (address bar, text fields, etc).

There's no way to change Opera's behavior (that I've found).

If you can remember to click onto a page rather than the address bar before exiting out of Opera, it won't break the soft keyboard nearly as often. That is, I haven't found any apps that force it to glitch out in that manner. If you're interested in knowing why, it keeps modifying the value of HKLM\Software\Tegic\eT9\IME -- CurrentET9Style to either 1 or 2, and it needs to stay at 0 for the soft keyboard to stay "normal".

However, there is no fix for the broken SYM key on the QWERTY, so if you depend on that, don't install it. I've been looking at all the keyboard layout files though to see if this can't be addressed, but to date, I've never found anything that's effective.