Problems with Finnish Keyboard and Ruby's irb

I ran into a problem with Ruby's interactive shell, irb, on Windows XP: it did not accept alt-gr generated characters with the Finnish keyboard, which prevents you from typing characters such as [ or @. The solution was found here:

Basically create the following file, .inputrc, in your home directory(C:\Documents and Settings\<username>):

"\M-[": "["
"\M-]": "]"
"\M-{": "{"
"\M-}": "}"
"\M-\\": "\\"
"\M-|": "|"
"\M-@": "@"
"\M-~": "~"
"\M-$": "$"

Then add the following line to the start of <ruby-dist>\bin\irb.bat:

@echo off
set HOME=%HOMEPATH%

and it should work fine. A real showstopper, though, which I haven't seen in other tools (such as Python's shell).