Paul Randall

Comments inline: hopefully an expert will correct any mistakes I'm making
here.

"BrokenBokkenProductions"
<BrokenBokkenProductions@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E065BA89-896D-4936-B7A2-983EF5E1CC67@microsoft.com...
>I have chinese installed on my pc (English is default language and I lve in
> the US). I know it's installed because I can view websites in chinese and
> it
> shows the chinese characters.

Yes you have the chinese charset installed on your computer. The only
reason that chinese characters are displayed when you view these websites is
that the HTML explicitly specifies the charset to be used.

> Windows live shows chinese characters. When I
> run the application or even the install, it shows a lot of question marks
> and
> other weird characters.

This application and its installation package, just blindly thinks it is
being installed on a Chinese computer and doesn't specify any particular
charset to be used, so it uses your default which is US-English, and you get
?????

> I believe the application is written in C++. My
> friend (who lives in china), can run the same version and he sees the
> chinese
> charaacters, but he is using windows XP (chinese version). Is there a way
> to
> make it so the application will display the Chinese characters without
> turning my entire operating system to chinese or am I just out of luck?

You might try emailing the vendor or check their website for a way to run
the installation package and the software under a specific charset. It is
easy to change the charset during the execution of a script, but I don't
know how to execute a program within the namespace of that changed charset.

If you have Vista Ultimate, you may be able to download and install the
appropriate language pack (or whatever it is called) so that the default can
be chinese.

-Paul Randall