I have a program called glovepie that translates input commands to other input commands (keyboard commands as joystick commands, etc) that woild read my tilde key as "excel" like a specaisl command for opening microsoft excel.
I deleted all the drivers under the "hid input devices" thing in the device manager, including this microsoft infrared thing. by the time I got done my keyboard and mouse didn't work, I just unplugged them, plugged them back in, and just like that, the console works.
also, glovepie now reads the tilde key as "console" instead of "excel"