Actually, as noted in the other thread, I am using English Win2k. The _files_ themselves are all in English; this includes all UI elements and DLLs. All paths are English too, since the language support was added after first boot. Besides, the Chinese people don't seem to like renaming "Documents and Settings" and such since Chinese isn't exactly usable under DOS. However, the system codepage is set to 950 or some such. So all ANSI text is interpreted to be MBCS.
I'm guessing that the code to find the directory where everything is, for some reason, is using strange characters (extended ASCII, where high bit is on) that get interpreted as being the first half of a double-byte character. I'm trying to look at the source, but being as incompentent as I am, got lost after 5 secs.
Maybe compiling (after porting of course) to Unicode would help, but that would be not supporting all Win9x platforms. Not good.
Will uninstall and reinstall now, and try to add the files from the langpack in one at a time to see what, exactly, fixes the bug. Does the langpack installer do anything, other than copy up to 8 files into \components? If there are registry entries or whatnot, they could cause it too.
Oh, Andrew, just so you know, I'm logged in as Power User, so it doesn't need Admin rights.