This has my curiousity. Macs generate characters based on font plus combination keys -- the special character in one font will be different in some cases from another with the same keystroke.

Pardon me while I run a wee test:

Plain: abcdefghijklm,nopqrstuvwxyz`1234567890-= Opt:å*ç*´ƒ©·ˆ*°¬µ˜ø*œ®ßݨ**=¥*¡™£¢*§¶•ªº–* shiftopt:å*ç*´ƒ©·ˆ*°¬µ˜ø*œ®ßݨ**=¥*/€ÐðÞþý°·‚—± éá´e·e

Hmmm...