Well, I appreciate all the assistance people have been trying to offer, but I'm still sadly unable to use the little tilde key.

I was thinking however, would the fact that I have a keyboard from an old XP model influence the behavior of it on a Vista programed computer?

I really am at a loss here because obviously the keyboard isn't broken. `/~
It has nothing to do with windows vista security settings because I've run it as administrator.
I've hit every key on my keyboard to see if just perhaps it was in an odd location. (This includes even the help hotkeys and sleep mode buttons lol)
It's not a corrupted file because I've re-installed the program about 4 times..
What else is there that could be the source of the problem?