I've been plagued by this problem for years now. And it has been a pain in the neck.
Basically, windows XP chinese IME had a bug where you couldn't switch off the ctrl-space code assist button regardless of what you set the control panel settings to be.
I used to stop the chinese input method when I coded, and enabled it when writing chinese (not that I really know what I'm typing!)
Solution? Registry hack:
- open "regedit.exe" in run dialog
- Browse the registry editor to the location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Input Method\Hot Keys\
- Now delete registry entries that with the name: 0000007x (x indicates any number)
