Vista - "Speech recognition could not start" error msg

Every time I open an Office app, I get a dialog saying
"Speech recognition could not start. Make sure your
audio hardware is working..."

I think it's a problem with language settings, because
the message will not appear if I change my language
to English Canada. However, after updating Windows
Live Mail recently to WLM 2009, I can only get WLM's
auto-spelling-correction feature to work if I select
English US.

I reported the apparent bug in WLM but didn't get
any confirmation that it is a bug, or that anything
would be done about it.

Meanwhile, I'm living with English US so that WLM
will work.

That leaves me with the error message from the
speech recogntion system each time I open an
office app.

I don't use speech recogntion (I had just tried it
once, long ago). Does anyone know of a way to
get rid of the error message above? Is there
a way to completely disable/uninstall speech
recognition?

(In case the above was confusing, here's another
description:

If I set English US, WLM works but Office issues
SR error (above).

If I set English Canada (my preference), WLM
auto-correct stops working but Office starts without
any SR errors.

If WLM would work with English Canada, all would
be fine. Meanwhile, is there a way to suppress
the SR error?