Comment 31 for bug 112955

I have a temporary workaround for US English keyboard. I don't know if it will work for any other keyboard settings but you might try and report back.

1) Open gconf editor in a terminal:
     $gconf-editor

obviously if you are trying to do this with a messed up terminal, you won't be able to. The fix for that is to enable gconf editor by right clicking on Applications > Edit Menus and enabling "Configuration Editor" under "System Tools" then you can do everything with mouse clicks

2) navigate to desktop > gnome > peripherals > keyboard > kbd

3) find the key name "layouts" and double click it. This will bring up an "Edit Key" window. Click on add, then type any two characters and click "OK".

Note: it seems that any two characters will work, so what you type shouldn't matter

4) Close out of gconf editor, and then kill and restart your vnc session. You should now see expected characters when you type. You may see an ugly error screen that KBD has failed, but this does not seem to affect anything.

Good luck, this worked for me, hope it works on non US character sets as well

Cheers,

Will