Can't unlock MacBook: Keyboard set on wrong language

I have my MacBook Pro set so that I must enter a password to unlock the screen. Last time it locked, I had the keyboard set on Russian, and now my password is not recognized and thus I cannot access my computer. I tried these things:

1. I turned the computer off and restarted. Apparently this did not reset the language to US; my password is still not accepted.

2. I rebooted using the original OS X Install DVD. In the menu, I chose to "reset password", and changed the passwords of root and the user (there's only one user) to "12345", which uses the same keys in US and Russian keyboards. Upon restarting, the computer recognized my new user password in the login window. But then it asked for a password to unlock the screen, and it recognized neither the new nor the old password. Apparently the password to unlock was not changed and the keyboard is still set in Russian.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Sounds like the old "catch 22" from the movie. I would first try resetting the PRAM to see if that will work. If that doesn't work, you may be looking at a re-install if you have no backup.

Also, see if you can unlock the screen in safe mode. Start up holding down your shift key.

A solution.

Thank you for your suggestions; I didn't know about resetting the PRAM.

Here's what ended up working:

I rebooted and was able to log in as root, without having to unlock the screen, as that setting is user-specific. Then I deleted the keychain file of the user whose screen I had locked, found in the folder Users/username/Library/Keychains. Logging back in as the user, the unlock-screen window accepted the new password that I had previously set from the OS X Installer.

Apparently, the computer goes to the keychain even for accessing user passwords. So even though I had reset it in Installer, it was not changed in the keychain.

Good solution. I forgot that you had done the reset for the ROOT user as well. Thanks for posting back.