Don’t hesitate to reach out to Wolfram technical support. Stack exchange and community can help with many issues but some can only be handled by Wolfram Research. This post sums it up nicely I think.
It seems that the same bug goes for [Ctrl]+6 for x^y. It would be nice to know if this bug is reproducible for you guys at Wolfram and how quickly this might be fixed (since the usage of the palette is really annoying). THX.